Froude’s position was now, from a worldly point of view, deplorable.  For the antagonism of High Churchmen he was of course prepared.  “Never mind,” he wrote to Clough of The Nemesis, “if the Puseyites hate it; they must fear it, and it will work in the mind they have made sick.”  But he was also assailed in the Protestant press as an awful example of what the Oxford Movement might engender.  His book was denounced on all sides, even by freethinkers, who regarded it as a reproach to their cause.  The professors of University College, London, had appointed him to a mastership at Hobart Town in Australia, for which he applied the year before in the hope that change of scene might help to re-settle his mind.  On reading the attacks in the newspapers they pusillanimously asked him to withdraw, and he withdrew.  A letter to Clough, dated the 6th of March, 1849, explains his intellectual and material position at this time in a vivid and striking manner.

“I admire Matt. to a very great extent, only I don’t see what business he has to parade his calmness, and lecture us on resignation, when he has never known what a storm is, and doesn’t know what to resign himself to.  I think he only knows the shady side of nature out of books.  Still I think his versifying, and generally his aesthetic power is quite wonderful ....  On the whole he shapes better than you, I think, but you have marble to cut out, and he has only clay ....  Do you think that if the Council do ask me to give up I might fairly ask Lord Brougham as their President to get me helped instead to ever so poor an honest living in the Colonies?  I can’t turn hack writer, and I must have something fixed to do.  Congreve is down-hearted about Oxford:  not so I. I quite look to coming back in a very few years.”

The Archdeacon, conceiving that the best remedy for free thought was short commons, stopped his son’s allowance.  Froude would have been alone in the world, if the brave and generous Kingsley had not come to his assistance.  Like a true Christian, he invited Froude to his house, and made him at home there.  To appreciate the magnanimity of this offer we must consider that Kinglsey was himself suspected of being a heretic, and that his prominent association with Froude brought him letters of remonstrance by every post.  He said nothing about them, and Froude, in perfect ignorance of what he was inflicting upon his host, stayed two months with him at Ilfracombe and Lynmouth.  Yet Kingsley did not, and could not, agree with Froude.  He was a resolved, serious Christian, and never dreamt of giving up his ministry.  He did not in the least agree with Froude, who made no impression upon him in argument.  He acted from kindness, and respect for integrity.