However he conducted his life or voiced his beliefs subsequently, Hawthorne
gained in this family and in the church a knowledge of the Bible that later
was to permeate his work. He also received an intimate knowledge of conflicting
opinions about religion. Later he observed in his notebook, 'The conversation
of the steeples of a city, when the bells are ringing on Sunday-Calvinist,
Episcopalian, Unitarian etc.' (CE 8:242). Though he stopped listening to sermons
as soon as he could dictate his own actions, he 'never quite passed beyond
the limits of a Christian imagination,' as Michael Colacurcio says. And that
imagination was nurtured in the Salem of his boyhood (110).
