I can easily understand how the anonymous writer of the "Ecce Homo" came to conceive the idea of his book, and to confine it within the limits which he has himself assigned: I can also understand his motives. Like all his contemporaries, he is placed and lives in presence of the grave questions agitated in these days respecting Christianity and its author. What was Christ?--a man or very God, or God and man at once? How did the divine nature and the human nature manifest themselves in him? Did he really effect the miracles assigned to him? Can there be such things as miracles? What are we to understand by the supernatural? Is God a real being personal and free, existing and accomplishing his works in a region beyond that which we style Nature? Christianity and the life of its founder inevitably suggest all these questions, which in our days occupy and violently agitate men's minds. The anonymous author of the "Ecce Homo" did not wish to enter upon them; nay, it was his aim to study and comprehend Christ without touching them at all. Is it because upon these grave problems he entertains himself no positive and decided opinions? Or, because he wished, to a certain extent, to accommodate himself to the state of opinion of some of his contemporaries, and to treat Christ as those speak of him who only see in him a man, who regard Christianity as a fact not supernatural, owing its origin, like other natural facts, to the sole and proper force of mankind? {217} Upon this I can form no opinion; I neither know the anonymous author of the "Ecce Homo," nor the motives which actuate him: what is certain is, that he is quite right in entitling his book "Ecce Homo," for it is only the Man Christ that he has proposed to study, and it is by studying the Man Christ that he has proposed to explain Christianity. I do not know if, after having written his book, he was aware of the result to which it leads, but the result is in effect a strange one,--it is condemnatory and destructive of the fundamental idea of the book, it demonstrates by a sincere and honest, although an incomplete and superficial study of the facts, the impossibility of explaining either Christ by the human nature alone, or the Christian Religion by any merely natural operations of humanity.