cessfully all ignoble
ones. Furthermore, it shows us that these gifts of Christianity offered
themselves, and still offer themselves, not only in philosophemes and
doctrines, in parables and myths, in postulates and prophecies, but what,
indeed, is not the case in any other religion, in an arranged course of
deeds and facts which, in everything that is necessary and essential for
the acquisition of that idea of God and for the realization of that ideal
of mankind, legitimate themselves to criticism as historical facts, and
which legitimate themselves as actions of divine manifestation by the fact,
that they and their consequences also are really able to fulfill what they
promise, and to bring mankind nearer to the accomplishment of that goal
which they set up for it. Finally, it shows us, when it reviews and
compares the development of {407} culture among all mankind, that the
Christian nations have really borne the richest blossom and fruit which has
appeared hitherto on the tree of mankind, and that Christianity, for the
life of nations, has not only, like other religions, powers of
preservation, but also powers of renovation and renewal which other
religions are wanting. Even all the errors of superstition and immorality,
of intolerance and lust of power, of so many of its advocates and
confessors, at which the adversaries of the Christian view of the world so
willingly point, are but a confirmation of its value. For they show us how
divine and heavenly the gift must be, if even such errors were not able to
smother its fruits. If we do not wish to suppose that mankind has
foundations and ends which up to the present it is not yet allowed to know,
we certainly must look for these foundations and ends where we find the
best which has so far been given to mankind and which has been accomplished
by it.

This acknowledgment of Christianity as the only true and only really
universal religion leads us beyond another sentiment of Lessing, which has
found an equally strong or perhaps still stronger echo in the mind. We mean
the expression that, if he had to choose, he would prefer the continual
search for truth to the possession of truth itself. We emphatically
acknowledge the holy right and the high nobility of this impulse of
investigation and activity, but we need not buy its acknowledgment and
satisfaction at the price of being obliged to renounce a consciousness or
the hope of a consciousness which is equally indispensabl