nd
ridicule upon those who violently defend an antiquated order of things;
and Goetze has received at the hands of posterity his full share of
abuse. His wrath contrasted unfavourably with Lessing's calmness; and it
was his misfortune to have taken up arms against an opponent who always
knew how to keep the laugh upon his own side. For my own part I am
constrained to admire the militant pastor, as Lessing himself admired
him. From an artistic point of view he is not an uninteresting figure
to contemplate. And although his attempts to awaken persecution were
reprehensible, yet his ardour in defending what he believed to be vital
truth is none the less to be respected. He had the acuteness to see that
Lessing's refutation of deism did not make him a Christian, while the
new views proposed as a substitute for those of Reimarus were such as
Goetze and his age could in no wise comprehend.

Lessing's own views of dogmatic religion are to be found in his work
entitled, "The Education of the Human Race." These views have since so
far become the veriest commonplaces of criticism, that one can hardly
realize that, only ninety years ago, they should have been regarded as
dangerous paradoxes. They may be summed up in the statement that all
great religions are good in their time and place; that, "as there is
a soul of goodness in things evil, so also there is a soul of truth
in things erroneous." According to Lessing, the successive phases of
religious belief constitute epochs in the mental evolution of the human
race. So that the crudest forms of theology, even fetishism, now to
all appearance so utterly revolting, and polytheism, so completely
inadequate, have once been the best, the natural and inevitable results
of man's reasoning powers and appliances for attaining truth. The
mere fact that a system of religious thought has received the willing
allegiance of large masses of men shows that it must have supplied some
consciously felt want, some moral or intellectual craving. And the
mere fact that knowledge and morality are progressive implies that each
successive system may in due course of time be essentially modified or
finally supplanted. The absence of any reference to a future state of
retribution, in the Pentateuch and generally in the sacred writings
of the Jews, and the continual appeal to hopes and fears of a worldly
character, have been pronounced by deists an irremediable defect in
the Jewish religion. It is precisely