There remains possible therefore only a third conception. Philo knows very well that God has an infinite number of powers or ideas, all of which might be called Logoi, and together constitute the Logos. If now, among these Logoi, that of humanity were conceived as highest, and Jesus were regarded as the incarnate Logos, as the expressed and perfectly realised idea of man, all would be intelligible. Jesus would then be the ideal man, the one among mortals who had fully realised the idea of man as it existed in God, who on the one side was the son of God, on the other side the son of man, the brother of all men, if they would only acknowledge Christ as the Son of God, and emulate His example. This would be a correct and to us a perfectly intelligible and acceptable conception. But many as are the difficulties which this would remove, the objection remains that we can produce no historical proof of such a conception of Jesus as Logos of humanity. We are too poor in historical monuments of the first three Christian centuries to be able to speak with assurance of the inner processes of thought of even the most prominent personalities of that time. In everything, even in relation to many of the leading questions of the Christian religion, we are obliged to rely on combination and construction. Not only in the Evangelists, but in many of the church fathers, feeling overcomes reason, and their expressions admit but too often of the most varied interpretations, as the later history of the church has only too clearly proved. Nevertheless we must endeavour to enter not only into their emotions, but also into their thoughts, and not believe that they used words without thoughts. I do not say that this is impossible. Unthinkable as it is, that words arise and exist without ideas, yet we know only too well that words become mere words, that they grow pale and die, and that they may finally become _vox et prœterea nihil_. It is, however, the duty of the historian and especially of the philologist to call back to life such words as have given up the ghost. May what I have here written about the meaning of the Logos fulfil this aim, and at the same time make it clear that my desire for the discovery of the original text of the _Sermo Verus_ was not an idle one. I have since learned that the same wish was expressed at an earlier date by no less a person than Barthold Niebuhr. CHAPTER II. The Pferdebürla (Horseherd)