These qualities are essential and indestructible in Christianity. They will survive all future changes of forms and all the possible modifications of doctrine which larger knowledge may make necessary.13

Like members of his congregation including Lottie Eliot, Snyder identified the Unitarian cause with earlier medieval, Renaissance and Reformation martyrs who had suffered ‘the honor of persecution’. He saw modern Unitarianism as emerging first in sixteenth-century Europe, then spreading in seventeenth-century England where, he claimed, ‘Among its most illustrious advocates were John Milton and Algernon Sidney.’ He stated that the first ‘distinctly known’ Unitarian Church in England had been established by Theophilus Lindsey in 1778. Snyder liked the roster of writers, including Coleridge, Anna Barbauld and Harriet Martineau, who had made Unitarianism such a literary faith. Boston and New England Unitarianism he saw as countering ‘frantic emotionalism’. He admired Unitarianism’s ideal of Christianity as ‘not a scheme of salvation to be defined by dogma, but the art of living virtuously and piously’. For him ‘The history of Christianity shows that if you will lift from any mind the repressive or interpretative force of a creed, leaving it free to face either the light of nature or the teachings of the Bible, it will inevitably lose the impress of orthodoxy.’14

This was the teaching that permeated Tom Eliot’s childhood home and the Unitarian faith community in which he was brought up. His extended family – from his uncle Thomas in Portland, Oregon, to his many New England cousins – belonged to a clan who were, he joked later, ‘the Borgias of Unitarianism’.15 Uncle Tom Eliot authored The Radical Difference Between Liberal Christianity and Orthodoxy, published by the American Unitarian Association in Boston. The Association’s future president would be young Tom’s Eastern Point playmate, cousin Fred. In St Louis the family’s Unitarianism was headquartered in the stone Church of the Messiah with its tall English Gothic spire on ‘Piety Hill’ at the corner of Locust Street and Garrison Avenue where the Reverend Snyder presided. For years Tom’s mother was secretary of the Mission Free School of the Church of the Messiah. In that church building, admired for its architectural design by Boston’s Peabody and Stearns, and for its memorial stained-glass windows by Scottish artist Daniel Cottier, Tom sat, sang, prayed, worshipped, fidgeted and looked around. Under the great exposed roof-beams he saw biblical stories turned into stained-glass art: Christ as the sower, the good Samaritan, the wise and foolish virgins.

Among these windows, too, were contributions linking poetry to Christianity. A memorial window to a thirteen-year-old girl who had died in 1875 alluded to Longfellow’s poem ‘The Reaper and the Flowers’ with its white dove and angel of death; its inscription was taken from the Gospel of Luke 20:36, in the King James version: ‘Neither can they die any more, for they are equal unto the angels.’ Another Cottier stained-glass window showed an angel musician, but the dominant windows, facing the congregation, were, like Eliot’s grandfather’s theology, firmly centred on Christ and the biblical parables. Towards the end of his life, William Greenleaf Eliot had worried that the Church of the Messiah risked ‘becoming less a church than a society. The religious strength less, the social greater.’ His church’s architecture was designed to separate the purely social aspects from the area reserved for worship. The congregation sat surrounded by rich stained-glass memorials to former members that spoke not just of the society on earth but of that in heaven and of Christ himself. It communicated through powerful imagery and structure William Greenleaf Eliot’s conviction that ‘the best citizen … receives from the community he serves far more than he can give’, and it extended that sense of community to include both the traditions of the local dead and union with Christ himself.16 Yet Snyder’s creedless Unitarianism could easily become mere undogmatic politeness.

Among generations of Unitarian Eliots, Tom grew up to be the one that got away. Yet an interest in the ‘primitive’ roots of religion, and in tracing religion to its earliest stages that is so evident in the Reverend Snyder’s thinking would be a continuing preoccupation. Tom was not reading theology in his cradle, but certainly imbibed it from boyhood. Occasionally, too, picking up books almost at random around the ‘family library’, quite different kinds of religion intrigued him: ‘I came across, as a boy, a poem for which I have preserved a warm affection: The Light of Asia, by Sir Edwin Arnold. It is a long epic poem on the life of Gautama Buddha: I must have had a latent sympathy for the subject-matter, for I read it through with gusto, and more than once.’17 In this work, subtitled The Great Renunciation, Edwin Arnold presented the Buddha as combining ‘the intellect of a sage and the passionate devotion of a martyr’. Reading it, Tom, who would go on to study Buddhist texts at university, read about ‘The Scripture’ of a ‘Saviour of the World’ who was not Christ. He discovered, too, ‘The thunder of the preaching of the word’ in Buddhist beliefs, where to be ‘saint-like’ meant something non-Christian, something alien whose ‘Wheel of perfect Law’ was intriguing not least because aspects of it chimed with his parents’ religion.18

From infancy Tom knew he belonged not just to a special family but to a community that included the dead as well as the living, and whose great exemplar was his Saviour. Issues of faith and doubt were as inescapable as his own Christian name; a fondness for church buildings was something he carried from his childhood to his old age. St Louis Unitarianism gave him much to come to terms with. Eventually he felt he had been brought up in ‘a strong atmosphere of the most Liberal theology’, but concluded in adulthood that soulful ‘Unitarianism is a bad preparation for brass tacks like birth, copulation, death, hell, heaven and insanity.’19 His adult poetry likes to puncture romantic illusion with a sharp application of brass tacks.

Not long after passing from the tutelage of Mrs Lockwood to the much larger educational premises of Smith Academy, ten-year-old Tom created his earliest surviving literary work. The previous term he had started at Smith, gaining entry direct to its Preparatory Department’s Year 2, where he had been studying Arithmetic, Geography, Spelling, Drawing, Writing, English and French. Familiar with words such as ‘comatose’, and eager to write down interesting sounds including the ‘Click, click, clack’ of ‘the telegraph’, Tom clearly relished language; his studying French so early at Smith Academy was unusual, the first indication of a Francophilia that would shape his literary life.20 Reading in English seems to have directed him towards Classical culture as well as to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Tanglewood Tales featured on the curriculum along with Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for my Children.21 In both volumes Tom encountered, probably for the first time, the story of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur, which would be alluded to in his poetry. Yet the Fireside, the childhood magazine he wrote in January and February 1899 owes nothing at all to his schoolbooks.