2. "That in this 'more' the Bible is still infallible, is mere hypothesis."
3. "The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not the Religion."
4. "The objections therefore against the letter and against the Bible, are not on that account objections against the spirit and against the Religion."
5. "Moreover there was a religion ere there was a Bible."
6. "Christianity was in being before Evangelists and Apostles had written. Some time elapsed before the first of them wrote, and a very considerable time before the whole canon was constituted."
7. "However much, therefore, may depend on these writings, it is impossible that the whole truth of the Christian religion can rest upon them."
8. "If there was a period during which, diffused as the Christian religion already was, and many as were the souls filled already with its power, still not a letter had yet been written of the records which have come down to us; then it must be also possible for all the writings of Evangelists and Apostles to perish, yet the religion taught by them still to subsist."
9. "The religion is not true because Evangelists and Apostles taught it; but they taught it because it is true."
10. "Its interior truth must furnish the interpretation of the writings it has handed down; and no writings handed down can give it interior truth, if it has none."
In his controversy with Göze, he illustrates this distinction between the essence and the historical form of Christianity, by a parable to the following effect. A wise king of a great realm built a palace of immense size and very peculiar architecture. About this structure, there came from the very first a foolish strife to be carried on, especially among reputed connoisseurs, people, that is, who had least looked into the interior. This strife was not about the palace itself, but about various old ground-plans of it, and drawings of the same, very difficult to make out. Once, when the watchmen cried out "Fire," these connoisseurs, instead of running to help, snatched up their plans, and, instead of putting out the fire on the spot, kept standing with their plans in hand, making a hubbub all the while, and squabbling about whether this was the spot on fire, and that the place to put it out. Happily, the safety of the palace did not depend on these busy wranglers, for it was not on fire at all; the watchmen had been frightened by the Northern lights, and mistaken them for fire. It is impossible to convey by a clearer image Lessing's feeling, that a Christianity once incorporated in the very substance of history and civilization, seated deep in human sentiment and thought, and developed into literature, law, and life, subsists independently of critical questions, and is with us, not as the contingent vapor that a wind may rise to blow away, but as the cloud that has dropped its rain and mingled with the roots of things.