[166] See it analysed by Bartholmèss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, i, 147–67; and by Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historic Jesus (trans. of Von Reimarus zu Wrede), 1910. [↑]
[167] Gostwick, p. 47; Bartholmèss, i, 166. His book was translated into English (The Principal Truths of Natural Religion Defended and Illustrated) in 1766; into Dutch in 1758; in part into French in 1768; and seven editions of the original had appeared by 1798. [↑]
[170] The statement that, in Lessing’s age, “in north Germany men were able to think and write freely” (Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit., p. 80) is thus seen to be highly misleading. [↑]
[171] Von dem Zwecke, Jesus und seiner Jünger, Braunschweig, 1778. [↑]
[172] Taylor, Histor. Survey of German Poetry, i, 365. [↑]
[174] Cp. Introd. to Willis’s trans. of Nathan. The play is sometimes attacked as being grossly unfair to Christianity. (E.g. Crouslé, Lessing, 1863, p. 206.) The answer to this complaint is given by Sime, ii, 252 sq. [↑]
[175] See Cairns, Appendix, Note I; Willis, Spinoza, pp. 149–62; Sime, ii, 299–303; and Stahr, ii, 219–30, giving the testimony of Jacobi. Cp. Pünjer, i, 564–85. But Heine laughingly adjures Moses Mendelssohn, who grieved so intensely over Lessing’s Spinozism, to rest quiet in his grave: “Thy Lessing was indeed on the way to that terrible error ... but the Highest, the Father in Heaven, saved him in time by death. He died a good deist, like thee and Nicolai and Teller and the Universal German Library” (Zur Gesch. der Rel. und Philos. in Deutschland, B. ii, near end.—Werke, ed. 1876, iii. 69). [↑]