Close to the centre of this book, we reach the centre of the life we are disclosing.

Butterfield contemplated, invigilated, thought about, worried about, conversed with and argued with God every day of his conscious life. He did it in his own way and often on his own terms. There is little evidence of a consistent prayerful life though a couple of the private meditations may also have been prayed. God was a Person, rather, whom one dealt with on the run: an omnipresent companion in the train, the lecture theatre or the university committee. Butterfield did not worship, either, in a conventional sense because he worshipped nothing; and nothing irritated him more than watching Anglo-Catholics bobbing up and down, always on their knees and swishing signs of the cross, always bowing and chanting and swinging their thuribles beneath clouds of incense. He deprecated swearing but they and the Romanists certainly seem to have got to him. ‘I'll love God and if you like I'll press with my whole bloody being towards perfection but “reverence” has the sickening flavour of primitive taboo & primeval fear.’ What God lost in submission, He gained in friendship, and Butterfield made of his God a lifelong friend and comforter. To think in those terms, on the other hand, makes God sound like a casual accomplice rather than a product of earnest striving and theological discussion, and Butterfield's long engagement with the idea of God as Love itself needs more than passing emphasis.