As a young man he married Sarah, a daughter of Anthony Lawrence, described as a "comfortable proprietor" of County Wicklow,[2] who was of Cromwellian settler ancestry.
His counter-blast to the Oxford Movement, The Touchstone of Orthodoxy and Apostolic Christianity, or, The People's Antidote Against Puseyism and Romanism, appeared in 1842.
[2] In 1842, Godkin became an ally of Charles Gavan Duffy on the Irish land question, and his interest in religion began to give way to his involvement in political protest.
In 1845 it was revealed that he had written a prize-winning essay called The Rights of Ireland, and he parted company with the Irish Evangelical Society.
After two years in England, he moved to Dublin, where he took up the chief editorial post on the city's new Daily Express newspaper.
One son, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, became a notable newspaper editor in America, editor-in-chief of The Nation and the Evening Post, and in 1870 declined the appointment of professor of history at Harvard.