give us the great
pleasure of yours."

Clough neither fished, nor shot, nor boated, but as a walking
companion there was no one, in Froude's opinion, to be put above
him. For fishing he gave pre-eminence to Kingsley, and together they
carried up their coracles to waters higher than ordinary boats could
reach. Kingsley was ardent in all forms of sport, and an enthusiast
for Maurician theology, holding, as he said, that it had pleased God
to show him and Maurice things which He had concealed from Carlyle.
He had concealed them also from Froude, who regarded Carlyle as his
teacher, feeling that he owed him his emancipation from clerical
bonds.

Froude and Kingsley did not agree either in theology or in politics.
"I meant to say," Froude wrote to his wife's brother-in-law in 1851,
"that the philosophical necessity of the Incarnation as a fact must
have been as cogent to the earliest thinkers as to ourselves. If we
may say it must have been, they might say so. And they might, and
indeed must, have concluded, each at their several date, that the
highest historical person known to them must have been the Incarnate
God; so that unless the Incarnation was the first fact in human
history, there must have been a time when they would have used the
argument and it would have led them wrong."

Concerning Kingsley's Socialism, especially as shown in Hypatia,
Froude was cold and critical. "It is by no means as yet clear to
me," he wrote about this time, "that all good people are Socialists,
and that therefore whoever sticks to the old thing is a bad fellow.
Whatever is has no end of claims on us. I have no doubt that we
could not get on without the devil. If it had not been so, he would
not have been. The ideas must be content to fight a long time before
they assimilate all the wholesome flesh in the universe, and we
cannot leave what works somehow for what only promises to work, and
has yet by no means largely realised that promise. I consider it a
bad sign in the thinkers among the Christian Socialists if they set
to cursing those who don't agree with them. The multitudes must, but
the thinkers should not. I cannot believe that if Clement of
Alexandria had been asked whether he candidly believed Tacitus was
damned because he was a heathen he would have said 'Yes.' Indeed, on
indifferent matters (supposing he had been alive in Tacitus's time),
I don't think he would have minded writing a leader in the Acta
Diurna, even though Tac