This was, in Mr. Cleaver’s opinion, sophistry almost as bad as Newman’s, and Froude’s tutorship came to an end.  There was no quarrel, and, after a tour through the south of Ireland, where he saw superstition and irreverence, solid churches, well-fed priests, and a starving peasantry in rags, Froude returned for a farewell visit to Delgany.  On this occasion he met Dr. Pusey, who had been at Christ Church with Mr. Cleaver, and was then visiting Bray.  Dr. Pusey, however, was not at his ease He was told by a clerical guest, afterwards a Bishop, with more freedom than courtesy, that they wanted no Popery brought to Ireland, they had enough of their own.  The sequel is curious.  For while Newman justified Mr. Cleaver by going over to Rome, his own sons, including Froude’s pupil, became Puseyite clergymen of the highest possible type.  Froude returned to Oxford at the beginning of 1842, and won the Chancellor’s Prize for an English essay on the influence of political economy in the development of nations.  In the summer he was elected to a Devonshire Fellowship at Exeter, and his future seemed secure.  But his mind was not at rest.  It was an age of ecclesiastical controversy, and Oxford was the centre of what now seems a storm in a teacup.  Froude became mixed up in it.  On the one hand was the personal influence of Newman, who raised more doubts than he solved.  On the other hand Froude’s experience of Evangelical Protestantism in Ireland, where he read for the first time The Pilgrim’s Progress, contradicted the assumption of the Tractarians that High Catholicity was an essential note of true religion.  Gradually the young Fellow became aware that High Church and Low Church did not exhaust the intellectual world.  He read Carlyle’s French revolution, and Hero Worship, and Past and Present.  He read Emerson too.  For Emerson and Carlyle the Church of England did not exist.  Carlyle despised it.

Emerson had probably not so much as given it a thought in his life.  But what struck Froude most about them was that they dealt with actual phaenomena, with things and persons around them, with the world as it was.  They did not appeal to tradition, or to antiquity, but to nature, and to the mind of man.  The French Revolution, then but half a century old, was interpreted by Carlyle not as Antichrist, but as God’s judgment upon sin.

Perhaps one view was not more historical than the other.  But the first was groundless, and second had at least some evidence in support of it.  God may be, or rather must be, conceived to work through other instruments besides Christianity.  “Neither in Jerusalem, nor on this mountain, shall men worship the Father.”  Carlyle completed what Newman had begun, and the dogmatic foundation of Froude’s belief gave way.  The two greatest geniuses of the age, as he thought them, agreeing in little else, agreed that Christianity did not rest upon reason.  Then upon what did it rest?  Reason appeals to one.  Faith is the appanage of a few.  From Carlyle Froude went to Goethe, then almost unknown at Oxford, a true philosopher as well as a great poet, an example of dignity, a liberator of the human soul.