Christian Socialism was one among a number of enthusiasms which lodged in Kingsley's mind – mesmerism, and sea shell collecting were others – and it was rather characteristic of his impulsive and passionate nature that it did not remain there for more than a few years. He was, according to John Ludlow, his colleague in the Christian Socialist movement, a man of ‘rugged strength and headlong dash’. According to another colleague, Thomas Hughes, he was ‘born a fighting man and believed in bold attack’. Recent writers have tended to agree in noting the significance of Kingsley's impulsiveness. His actions have been described as ‘so unco-ordinated’ that ‘each faded into oblivion when succeeded by another’; he had ‘no staying power’. His enthusiasms were ‘inconsistent or even flatly contradictory’. He had, another has remarked, great energy ‘in seizing upon the ideas of men more original than he’. His mind was certainly innocent of great intellectual insight: his theological learning at the time of his ordination in 1842 amounted to the gleanings and scraps picked up from a collection of books he had taken with him on a fishing trip to South Devon. It was subsequently enriched by his wife, who was steeped in the writings of the Tractarians. Charles Mansfield, who had known him from undergraduate days in Cambridge, used to say ‘that Kingsley knew all that was in a book by looking at the outside of it’. He became an eclectic reader, moving from subject to subject as successive moods of interest and impulse directed, acquiring sufficient knowledge of each to be able to offer firm and definitive opinions.