This is Butler’s own account of himself, taken from a letter to Sir Julius von Haast; although written in 1865 it is true of his mode of life for many years: 

I have been taking lessons in painting ever since I arrived, I was always very fond of it and mean to stick to it; it suits me and I am not without hopes that I shall do well at it.  I live almost the life of a recluse, seeing very few people and going nowhere that I can help—­I mean in the way of parties and so forth; if my friends had their way they would fritter away my time without any remorse; but I made a regular stand against it from the beginning and so, having my time pretty much in my own hands, work hard; I find, as I am sure you must find, that it is next to impossible to combine what is commonly called society and work.

But the time saved from society was not all devoted to painting.  He modified his letter to the Press about “Darwin among the Machines” and, so modified, it appeared in 1865 as “The Mechanical Creation” 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: 

“Et maintenant, Monsieur, vous allez creer,” meaning, as he understood her, that he had been looking long enough at the work of others and should now do something of his own.