He was ordained deacon in 1842 and priest in 1843, and served as curate first under his college tutor, Thomas Thorp (who had been the first president of the Cambridge Camden Society), at Kemerton in Gloucestershire, and afterwards at Brasted in Kent, under William Hodge Mill, who, as Regius Professor of Hebrew, had countenanced and encouraged his ecclesiological work at Cambridge, and whose daughter he married in 1847.