uries. 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