美国最著名的人

[abstract]提要

Henry Ward Beecher曾经是美国最著名的大臣（immensely famous minister）、废奴主义者（abolitionist）和公共智囊（public intellectual），他的地位被所谓的通奸罪名所动摇（allegations of adultery），并上了全国头条（nationwide headlines）。Beecher的催眠术演讲（mesmerizing oratory）和炙热的新闻专栏（fiery newspaper columns）令他成为最初的大众媒体的名人之一，他也被称为美国最著名的人。

下面这段文字摘自该书的开头，故事从Henry的童年讲起。

[excerpt]摘录

Chapter 1 “Damned If You Do, and Damned If You Don’t”

One evening in late December, sometime around 1820, Henry Ward Beecher trudged through the snow, returning home from running an errand for his parents. Exactly how old he was he couldn’t say, but he was still a chubby little boy, with wide gray eyes set above apple red cheeks. As he passed up the long town common in the center of the village, he was surprised to see Litchfeld’s little brown Episcopalian church lit up like a beacon in the early darkness.

Henry was far too young to follow the fine theological distinctions his father used to separate the good Protestants from the bad Protestants, but of this he was sure: The Episcopalians were on the bad side. He needed no other proof than the fact that they didn’t attend the white-steepled church where his father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, preached every Sunday. In truth, God and Lyman Beecher were so intertwined in the little boy’s mind that he did not quite grasp that Episcopalianism was a rival religion, he later recalled, “for I supposed there was no other religion except that which my father looked after.”

Henry was irresistibly drawn to the open door of the church, and as he peered in he was shocked to find candles blazing at every window; boughs of spruce, pine, and arborvitae twined around the pews; and a choir singing blissfully about the birth of Christ. He had never seen such a spectacle, certainly not in his father’s austere meeting house, and he could not imagine what it meant.

Although he did not know it then, this dazzling vision would be Henry’s only taste of Christmas as a child. Christmas “was not known in the house of my father, for he was a Puritan of the Puritans,” Henry said years later. “I never heard of Santa Claus when I was a boy. I never hung up a stocking. I feel bad about it to this day.”

[comment]点评

“A lively narrative of the nineteenth-century religion, power, passion, and politics, as well as a perceptive study of the elusive preacher who rode them to the top.”

―Joan D. Hedrick, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Harriet Beecher Stowe