Froude’s scepticism was too indiscriminate when it assailed the existence of St. Patrick, which is not now doubted by scholars, baseless as the Patrician legends may be.  Colgan’s Lives of Irish Saints had taken him back to Ireland, that he might examine the scenes described.  He visited them under the best guidance; and Petre, the learned historian of the Round Towers, showed him a host of curious antiquities, including a utensil which had come to be called the Crown of Brian Boru.  Legendary history made no impression upon Froude.  The actual state of Ireland affected him with the deepest interest.  A population of eight millions, fed chiefly upon potatoes, and multiplying like rabbits, light-hearted, reckless, and generous, never grudged hospitality, nor troubled themselves about paying their debts.  Their kindness to strangers was unbounded.  In the wilds of Mayo Froude caught the smallpox, and was nursed with a devotion which he always remembered, ungrateful as in some of his writings about Ireland he may seem.  After his recovery he wandered about the coast, saw the station of Protestant missionaries at Achill, and was rowed out to Clare Island, where a disabled galleon from the Armada had been wrecked.  His studies in hagiology led him to consider the whole question of the miraculous, and he found it impossible to work with Newman any more.  A religion which rested upon such stories as Father Colgan’s was a religion nurtured in lies.

All this, however, had nothing to do with the Church of England by law established, and Froude was ordained deacon in 1845.  The same year Newman seceded, and was received into the Church of Rome.  No similar event, before or since, has excited such consternation and alarm.  So impartial an observer as Mr. Disraeli thought that the Church of England did not in his time recover from the blow.  We are only concerned with it here as it affected Froude.  It affected him in a way unknown outside the family.  Hurrell Froude, who abhorred private judgment as a Protestant error, had told his brothers that when they saw Newman and Keble disagree they might think for themselves.  He felt sure that he was thereby guarding them against thinking for themselves at all.  But now the event which he considered impossible had happened.  Newman had gone to Rome.  Keble remained faithful to the Church of his baptism.  Which side Hurrell Froude would have taken nobody could say.  He had died a clergyman of the Church of England at the age of thirty-three, nine years before.  Anthony Froude had no inclination to follow Newman.  But neither did he agree with Keble.  He thought for himself.  Of his brief clerical career there exists a singular record in the shape of a funeral sermon preached at St. Mary’s Church, Torquay, on the second Sunday after Trinity, 1847.  The subject was George May Coleridge, vicar of the parish, the poet’s nephew, who had been cut off in the prime of life while Froude acted as his curate.  The sermon itself is not remarkable, except for being written in unusually good English.  The doctrine is strictly orthodox, and the simple life of a good clergyman devoted to his people is described with much tenderness of feeling.