The task of teaching the Sussex rustics was, as Precentor Venables remarks, intolerably irksome to a man of Newman's high intellectual power. It was like chopping logs with a fine-edged razor. His relations with his principal became strained, and a tussle between the usher and his class led to his dismissal. At this time he was miserably poor. Precentor Venables says: "To Hare he lamented the narrow-mindedness of his brothers John and Francis, who, as he asserted, had entirely cast him off, and left him to fight his way in the world unaided, because of his professed infidelity, in which the younger of the two, then an ardent Evangelical, was before very long to follow him." No reproach whatever is due to the younger brother on this account, and the elder is probably as little blameworthy. John Henry could not be expected to recommend as tutor one whose views upon faith and morals he considered unsound. Francis William had gone to Bagdad with the object of assisting in a Christian mission, and intercourse with Mohammedans and other studies were but gradually loosening his orthodoxy. After his return, and when his works and professorship at London University assured his position, he put himself into regular monthly communication with his brother. In the meantime he had been assisted by his sister Harriet's husband. But the iron had already entered his soul; he was an Atheist and an outcast. Forced to receive the bounty of relatives who deplored his opinions, he seems to have resented their kindness as an attempt to bribe his intellectual conscience. The world rang with the fame--as theologian, historian, poet, and preacher--of the elder, whose creed he had outgrown and despised; while his convictions, to the full as honest, everywhere stood in his way, and were contemned as an offence against faith and morals. He had no contact with minds congenial to his own, and doomed himself to the life of a recluse.
Each of the brothers was of a retiring, meditative disposition. Reading the Apologia Pro Vita Sua of the eldest, one may see how this contributed towards his seeking a refuge in the Catholic Church. The same disposition of mind may be traced in the Phases of Faith of the youngest, equally impelling him from the evangelicalism of his surroundings and leading to the rejection of historic Christianity, and finally to the surrender of all belief in revelation. In Charles Robert Newman the same qualities were seen to excess, removing him from contact with his fellows to the life of a solitary thinker in a quiet Welsh watering-place. From about 1853, he had a room in a small cottage on the Marsh road, Tenby.