of alle religions to bee not farre removed from blasphemie."
Intolerance was then a thing to be proud of, but in Lessing's time some
progress had been achieved, and men began to think it a good thing to
seem tolerant. The succeeding Fragments were to test this liberality
and reveal the flimsiness of the stuff of which it was made. When the
unknown disputant began to declare "the impossibility of a revelation
upon which all men can rest a solid faith," and when he began to
criticize the evidences of Christ's resurrection, such a storm burst out
in the theological world of Germany as had not been witnessed since
the time of Luther. The recent Colenso controversy in England was but
a gentle breeze compared to it. Press and pulpit swarmed with
"refutations," in which weakness of argument and scantiness of erudition
were compensated by strength of acrimony and unscrupulousness of
slander. Pamphlets and sermons, says M. Fontanes, "were multiplied, to
denounce the impious blasphemer, who, destitute alike of shame and of
courage, had sheltered himself behind a paltry fiction, in order to let
loose upon society an evil spirit of unbelief." But Lessing's artifice
had been intended to screen the memory of Reimarus, rather than his
own reputation. He was not the man to quail before any amount of human
opposition; and it was when the tempest of invective was just at its
height that he published the last and boldest Fragment of all,--on "the
Designs of Jesus and his Disciples."

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 inexo