name for evading them.  I think I have gained much by this postponement.  I have now a very definite notion of Christ’s character and that of his followers.  I shall be able to judge how far he was likely to deceive himself or them.  It is possible I may have put others, who can command more time than I, in a condition to take up the subject where for the present I leave it.

You say my picture suffers by my method.  But Ecce Homo is not a picture:  it is the very opposite of a picture; it is an analysis.  It may be, you will answer, that the title suggests a picture.  This may perhaps be true, and if so, it is no doubt a fault, but a fault in the title, not in the book.  For titles are put to books, not books to titles.

Thus it appears that the writer found it his duty to investigate those awful questions which every thinking man feels to be full of the “incomprehensible” and unfathomable, but which many thinking men, for various reasons both good and bad, shrink from attempting to investigate, accepting on practical and very sufficient grounds the religious conclusions which are recommended and sanctioned by the agreement of Christendom.  And finding it his duty to investigate them at all, he saw that he was bound to investigate in earnest.  But under what circumstances this happened, from what particular pressure of need, and after what previous belief or state of opinion, we are not told.  Whether from being originally on the doubting side—­on the irreligious side we cannot suppose he ever could have been—­he has risen through his investigation into belief; or whether, originally on the believing side, he found the aspect so formidable, to himself or to the world, of the difficulties and perplexities which beset belief, that he turned to bay upon the foes that dogged him—­must be left to conjecture.  It is impossible to question that he has been deeply impressed with the difficulties of believing; it is impossible to question that doubt has been overborne and trampled under foot.  But here we have the record, it would not be accurate to say of the struggle, but of that resolute and unflinching contemplation of the realities of the case which decided it.  Such plunging into such a question must seem, as he says, to those who do not need it, “audacious and perilous”; for if you plunge into a question in earnest, and do not under a thin disguise take a side, you must, whatever your bias and expectation, take your chance of the alternative answers which may come out.  It is a simple fact that there are many people who feel “dissatisfied with the current conceptions” of our Lord—­whether reasonably and justly dissatisfied is another question; but whatever we think of it they remain dissatisfied.  In such emergencies it is conceivable that a man who believes, yet keenly realises and feels what disturbs or destroys the belief of others, should dare to put himself in their place; should enter the hospital