A voyage around God and science may seem to take the eye away from what Butterfield spent most of his life doing. In fact it turns out to be a necessary route to the core of his historical work. Butterfield's notion of history and how it should be approached seems inaccessible until one first sees how the fundamental tension in his intellectual life concerned the relationship between Christian conviction and analytical method. He cared about Charles James Fox; he thought constantly about the reign of George III; he famously rejected what Lewis Namier and his acolytes wanted to do to them. Yet he would have expired a happy man if he could have worked out the larger view of Man, God and Truth, even if he did so without reference to anything any historian had ever written. The historical enterprise was always a subordinate one, a derivative, a deduction. It should be prosecuted, not simply for its own sake (whatever Ranke had thought) but as an exercise in congruence between analysis, without which history remained mere anecdotage, and a vision of God-in-time, without which analysis led only to dry rusks. He began, not with a sense of the necessity for history, but of the degree to which history always fell short as a guide to life. ‘When history comes to replace religion and philosophy as the basis for our conception of man and his destiny’, he once wrote, ‘it [is] impossible not to realise its inadequacy …’ It had a power to compel through its stories, its drama and literary effects.