The publication of these Fragments led to a mighty controversy. The most eminent, both for uncompromising zeal and for worldly position, of those who had attacked Lessing, was Melchior Goetze, "pastor primarius" at the Hamburg Cathedral. Though his name is now remembered only because of his connection with Lessing, Goetze was not destitute of learning and ability. He was a collector of rare books, an amateur in numismatics, and an antiquarian of the narrow-minded sort. Lessing had known him while at Hamburg, and had visited him so constantly as to draw forth from his friends malicious insinuations as to the excellence of the pastor's white wine. Doubtless Lessing, as a wise man, was not insensible to the attractions of good Moselle; but that which he chiefly liked in this theologian was his logical and rigorously consistent turn of mind. "He always," says M. Fontanes, "cherished a holy horror of loose, inconsequent thinkers; and the man of the past, the inexorable guardian of tradition, appeared to him far more worthy of respect than the heterodox innovator who stops in mid-course, and is faithful neither to reason nor to faith."
But when Lessing published these unhallowed Fragments, the hour of conflict had sounded, and Goetze cast himself into the arena with a boldness and impetuosity which Lessing, in his artistic capacity, could not fail to admire. He spared no possible means of reducing his enemy to submission. He aroused against him all the constituted authorities, the consistories, and even the Aulic Council of the Empire, and he even succeeded in drawing along with him the chief of contemporary rationalists, Semler, who so far forgot himself as to declare that Lessing, for what he had done, deserved to be sent to the madhouse. But with all Goetze's orthodox valour, he was no match for the antagonist whom he had excited to activity. The great critic replied with pamphlet after pamphlet, invincible in logic and erudition, sparkling with wit, and irritating in their utter coolness. Such pamphlets had not been seen since Pascal published the "Provincial Letters." Goetze found that he had taken up arms against a master in the arts of controversy, and before long he became well aware that he was worsted. Having brought the case before the Aulic Council, which consisted in great part of Catholics, the stout pastor, forgetting that judgment had not yet been rendered, allowed himself to proclaim that all who do not recognize the Bible as the only source of Christianity are not fit to be called Christians at all. Lessing was not slow to profit by this unlucky declaration. Questioned, with all manner of ferocious vituperation, by Goetze, as to what sort of Christianity might have existed prior to and independently of the New Testament canon, Lessing imperturbably answered: "By the Christian religion I mean all the confessions of faith contained in the collection of creeds of the first four centuries of the Christian Church, including, if you wish it, the so-called creed of the apostles, as well as the creed of Athanasius. The content of these confessions is called by the earlier Fathers the regula fidei, or rule of faith. This rule of faith is not drawn from the writings of the New Testament. It existed before any of the books in the New Testament were written. It sufficed not only for the first Christians of the age of the apostles, but for their descendants during four centuries. And it is, therefore, the veritable foundation upon which the Church of Christ is built; a foundation not based upon Scripture." Thus, by a master-stroke, Lessing secured the adherence of the Catholics constituting a majority of the Aulic Council of the Empire. Like Paul before him, he divided the Sanhedrim. So that Goetze, foiled in his attempts at using violence, and disconcerted by the patristic learning of one whom he had taken to be a mere connoisseur in art and writer of plays for the theatre, concluded that discretion was the surest kind of valour, and desisted from further attacks.
Lessing's triumph came opportunely; for already the ministry of Brunswick had not only confiscated the Fragments, but had prohibited him from publishing anything more on the subject without first obtaining express authority to do so. His last replies to Goetze were published at Hamburg; and as he held himself in readiness to depart from Wolfenbuttel, he wrote to several friends that he had conceived the design of a drama, with which he would tear the theologians in pieces more than with a dozen Fragments. "I will try and see," said he, "if they will let me preach in peace from my old pulpit, the theatre." In this way originated "Nathan the Wise." But it in no way answered to the expectations either of Lessing's friends or of his enemies. Both the one and the other expected to see the controversy with Goetze carried on, developed, and generalized in the poem. They looked for a satirical comedy, in which orthodoxy should be held up for scathing ridicule, or at least for a direful tragedy, the moral of which, like that of the great poem of Lucretius, should be
"Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum."
Had Lessing produced such a poem, he would doubtless have gratified his free-thinking friends and wreaked due literary vengeance upon his theological persecutors. He would, perhaps, have given articulate expression to the radicalism of his own time, and, like Voltaire, might have constituted himself the leader of the age, the incarnation of its most conspicuous tendencies. But Lessing did nothing of the kind; and the expectations formed of him by friends and enemies alike show how little he was understood by either. "Nathan the Wise" was, as we shall see, in the eighteenth century an entirely new phenomenon; and its author was the pioneer of a quite new religious philosophy.
Reimarus, the able author of the Fragments, in his attack upon the evidences of revealed religion, had taken the same ground as Voltaire and the old English deists. And when we have said this, we have sufficiently defined his position, for the tenets of the deists are at the present day pretty well known, and are, moreover, of very little vital importance, having long since been supplanted by a more just and comprehensive philosophy. Reimarus accepted neither miracles nor revelation; but in accordance with the rudimentary state of criticism in his time, he admitted the historical character of the earliest Christian records, and was thus driven to the conclusion that those writings must have been fraudulently composed. How such a set of impostors as the apostles must on this hypothesis have been, should have succeeded in inspiring large numbers of their contemporaries with higher and grander religious notions than had ever before been conceived; how they should have laid the foundations of a theological system destined to hold together the most enlightened and progressive portion of human society for seventeen or eighteen centuries,—does not seem to have entered his mind. Against such attacks as this, orthodoxy was comparatively safe; for whatever doubt might be thrown upon some of its leading dogmas, the system as a whole was more consistent and rational than any of the theories which were endeavouring to supplant it. And the fact that nearly all the great thinkers of the eighteenth century adopted this deistic hypothesis, shows, more than anything else, the crudeness of their psychological knowledge, and their utter lack of what is called "the historical sense."
Lessing at once saw the weak point in Reimarus's argument, but his method of disposing of it differed signally from that adopted by his orthodox contemporaries. The more advanced German theologians of that day, while accepting the New Testament records as literally historical, were disposed to rationalize the accounts of miracles contained in them, in such a way as to get rid of any presumed infractions of the laws of nature. This method of exegesis, which reached its perfection in Paulus, is too well known to need describing. Its unsatisfactory character was clearly shown, thirty years ago, by Strauss, and it is now generally abandoned, though some traces of it may still be seen in the recent works of Renan. Lessing steadily avoided this method of interpretation. He had studied Spinoza to some purpose, 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 confession to Jacobi is unequivocal enough, and cannot well be argued away. In that remarkable conversation, held toward the close of his life, he indicates clearly enough that his faith was neither that of the ordinary theist, the atheist, nor the pantheist, but that his religious theory of the universe was identical with that suggested by Spinoza, adopted by Goethe, and recently elaborated in the first part of the "First Principles" of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Moreover, while Lessing cannot be considered an antagonist of Christianity, neither did he assume the attitude of a defender. He remained outside the theological arena; looking at theological questions from the point of view of a layman, or rather, as M. Cherbuliez has happily expressed it, of a Pagan. His mind was of decidedly antique structure. He had the virtues of paganism: its sanity, its calmness, and its probity; but of the tenderness of Christianity, and its quenchless aspirations after an indefinable ideal, of that feeling which has incarnated itself in Gothic cathedrals, masses and oratorios, he exhibited but scanty traces. His intellect was above all things self-consistent and incorruptible. He had that imperial good-sense which might have formed the ideal alike of Horace and of Epictetus. No clandestine preference for certain conclusions could make his reason swerve from the straight paths of logic. And he examined and rejected the conclusions of Reimarus in the same imperturbable spirit with which he examined and rejected the current theories of the French classic drama.
Such a man can have had but little in common with a preacher like Theodore Parker, or with a writer like M. Fontanes, whose whole book is a noble specimen of lofty Christian eloquence. His attribute was light, not warmth. He scrutinized, but did not attack or defend. He recognized the transcendent merits of the Christian faith, but made no attempt to reinstate it where it had seemed to suffer shock. It was therefore with the surest of instincts, with that same instinct of self-preservation which had once led the Church to anathematize Galileo, that Goetze. proclaimed Lessing a more dangerous foe to orthodoxy than the deists who had preceded him. Controversy, he doubtless thought, may be kept up indefinitely, and blows given and returned forever; but before the steady gaze of that scrutinizing eye which one of us shall find himself able to stand erect? It has become fashionable to heap blame and 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 this, however, says Lessing, which constitutes one of its signal excellences. "That thy days may be long in the land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee," was an appeal which the uncivilized Jew could understand, and which could arouse him to action; while the need of a future world, to rectify the injustices of this, not yet being felt, the doctrine would have been of but little service. But in later Hebrew literature, many magnificent passages revealed the despair felt by prophet and thinker over the insoluble problem presented by the evil fate of the good and the triumphant success of the wicked; and a solution was sought in the doctrine of a Messianic kingdom, until Christianity with its proclamation of a future life set the question entirely aside. By its appeal to what has been aptly termed "other-worldliness," Christianity immeasurably intensified human responsibility, besides rendering clearer its nature and limits. But according to Lessing, yet another step remains to be taken; and here we come upon the gulf which separates him from men of the stamp of Theodore Parker. For, says Lessing, the appeal to unearthly rewards and punishments is after all an appeal to our lower feelings; other-worldliness is but a refined selfishness; and we are to cherish virtue for its own sake not because it will lead us to heaven. Here is the grand principle of Stoicism. Lessing believed, with Mr. Mill, that the less we think about getting rewarded either on earth or in heaven the better. He was cast in the same heroic mould as Muhamad Efendi, who when led to the stake exclaimed: "Though I have no hope of recompense hereafter, yet the love of truth constraineth me to die in its defence!"