in the Reasoner, a paper then published in London by Mr. G. J.
Holyoake. And his mind returned to the considerations which had
determined him to decline to be ordained. In 1865 he printed
anonymously a pamphlet which he had begun in New Zealand, the result
of his study of the Greek Testament, entitled The Evidence for the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the four Evangelists
critically examined. After weighing this evidence and comparing one
account with another, he came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ
did not die upon the cross. It is improbable that a man officially
executed should escape death, but the alternative, that a man
actually dead should return to life, seemed to Butler more
improbable still and unsupported by such evidence as he found in the
gospels. From this evidence he concluded that Christ swooned and
recovered consciousness after his body had passed into the keeping
of Joseph of Arimathaea. He did not suppose fraud on the part of
the first preachers of Christianity; they sincerely believed that
Christ died and rose again. Joseph and Nicodemus probably knew the
truth but kept silence. The idea of what might follow from belief
in one single supposed miracle was never hereafter absent from
Butler's mind.

In 1869, having been working too hard, he went abroad for a long
change. On his way back, at the Albergo La Luna, in Venice, he met
an elderly Russian lady in whose company he spent most of his time
there. She was no doubt impressed by his versatility and charmed,
as everyone always was, by his conversation and original views on
the many subjects that interested him. We may be sure he told her
all about himself and what he had done and was intending to do. At
the end of his stay, when he was taking leave of her, she said: