ion 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 a