Protestantism apart, however, Froude’s position as a clergyman had become intolerable.  He had been persuaded to accept ordination for the reason, among others, that the Church could be reformed better from within than from without.

But there were few doctrines of the Church that he could honestly teach, and the straightforward course was to abandon the clerical profession.  Nowadays a man in Froude’s plight would only have to sign a paper, and he would be free.  But before 1870 orders, even deacon’s orders, were indelible.  Neither a priest nor a deacon could sit in Parliament, or enter any other learned profession.  Froude was in great difficulty and distress.  He consulted his friends Arthur Stanley, Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Clough.  Clough, though a layman, felt the same perplexity as himself.  As a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel he had signed the Articles.  Now that he no longer believed in them, ought he not to live up his appointments?  The Provost, Dr. Hawkins, induced him to pause and reflect.  Meanwhile he published a volume of poetry, including the celebrated Bothie, about which Froude wrote to him: 

“I was for ever falling upon lines which gave me uneasy twitchings; e.g. the end of the love scene: 

“And he fell at her feet, and buried his face in her apron.

“I daresay the head would fall there, but what an image!  It chimes in with your notion of the attractiveness of the working business.  But our undisciplined ears have divided the ideas too long to bear to have them so abruptly shaken together.  Love is an idle sort of a god, and comes in other hours than the working ones; at least I have always found it so.  I don’t think of it in my working time, and when I see a person I do love working (at whatever it may be), I have quite another set of thoughts about her. . .  It would do excellently well for married affection, for it is the element in which it lives.  But I don’t think young love gets born then.  I only speak for myself, and from a very limited experience.  As to the story, I don’t the least object to it on The Spectator’s ground.  I think it could not have been done in prose.  Verse was wanted to give it dignity.  But if we find it trivial, the fault is in our own varnished selves.  We have been polished up so bright that we forget the stuff we are made of.”

Clough was in politics a Republican, and sympathised ardently with the French Revolution of 1848.  So did Charles Kingsley, a Cambridge man, who was at that time on a visit to Exeter.  But Kingsley, though a disciple of Carlyle, was also a hard-working clergyman, who held that the masses could be regenerated by Christian Socialism.  Froude had no faith in Socialism, nor in Christianity as the Church understood it.  In this year, 1848, Emerson also came to Oxford, and dined with Clough at Oriel, where they thought him like Newman.  Froude was already an admirer of Emerson’s essays, and laid his case before