se, and the outlines of Biblical
criticism laid down by that remarkable thinker Lessing developed into
a system wonderfully like that now adopted by the Tubingen school. The
cardinal results which Baur has reached within the past generation were
nearly all hinted at by Lessing, in his commentaries on the Fragments.
The distinction between the first three, or synoptic gospels, and the
fourth, the later age of the fourth, and the method of composition of
the first three, from earlier documents and from oral tradition, are
all clearly laid down by him. The distinct points of view from which
the four accounts were composed, are also indicated,--the Judaizing
disposition of "Matthew," the Pauline sympathies of "Luke," the
compromising or Petrine tendencies of "Mark," and the advanced Hellenic
character of "John." Those best acquainted with the results of modern
criticism in Germany will perhaps be most surprised at finding such
speculations in a book written many years before either Strauss or Baur
were born.

But such results, as might have been expected, did not satisfy the
pastor Goetze or the public which sympathized with him. The valiant
pastor unhesitatingly declared that he read the objections which
Lessing opposed to the Fragmentist with more horror and disgust than
the Fragments themselves; and in the teeth of the printed comments
he declared that the editor was craftily upholding his author in his
deistical assault upon Christian theology. The accusation was unjust,
because untrue. There could be no genuine cooperation between a mere
iconoclast like Reimarus, and a constructive critic like Lessing. But
the confusion was not an unnatural one on Goetze's part, and I cannot
agree with M. Fontanes in taking it as convincing proof of the pastor's
wrong-headed perversity. It appears to me that Goetze interpreted
Lessing's position quite as accurately as M. Fontanes. The latter
writer thinks that Lessing was a Christian of the liberal school since
represented by Theodore Parker in this country and by M. Reville in
France; that his real object was to defend and strengthen the Christian
religion by relieving it of those peculiar doctrines which to the
freethinkers of his time were a stumbling-block and an offence. And, in
spite of Lessing's own declarations, he endeavours to show that he was
an ordinary theist,--a follower of Leibnitz rather than of Spinoza. But
I do not think he has made out his case. Lessing's own confess