Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all
meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred
with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as
so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing
spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the
midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to
have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt
whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New
England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of
which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some
spectacle of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by
multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the
faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through
the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his
imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought.
It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations
should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of
heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for
Providence to write a people's doom upon. The belief was a
favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their
infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of
peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an
individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on
the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be
the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man,
rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and
secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of
nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a
fitting page for his soul's history and fate.
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We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye
and heart that the minister, looking upward to the zenith,
beheld there the appearance of an immense letter--the letter
A--marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may
have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil
of cloud, but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave
it, or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another's
guilt might have seen another symbol in it.
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