ar as to consider some of the doctrines of the New Testament to be an
accommodation on the part of our Lord to the Jewish notions; and regarded
Christ's work as the compromise between the Mosaic and philosophical
parties in the Jewish church, which afterwards were represented in the
Christian by St. Peter and St. Paul respectively.(690) Though he himself
held the apostles' creed, and was shocked at some later developments of
unbelief,(691) yet he seems to have considered practical morality to be at
once the sole aim of Christianity, and the supreme rule of doctrine.(692)
He founded no school; but his influence decidedly initiated the
rationalist movement within the church; one peculiarity of which will be
found to be, that it was professedly designed in defence of the church,
not as an attack upon it.

The tendency which we have just studied was within the church. The two now
about to be named were external to it. The one, earnest and scholarlike,
formed chiefly on the model of English deism, is represented by Lessing.
The other, modelled after Rousseau, was practical rather than
intellectual, and aimed at remodelling education as well as altering
belief.

Lessing,(693) a name honoured in the history of literature, is little
known in England, save by his exquisite comparison of art and poetry,
called the Laocoon.(694) He was one of those whose labours remain for the
benefit of other ages, like that of the coral worms, which die, but leave
their work. That a native German literature exists, is the work of Lessing
as pioneer; that it is worth studying, is the result of his criticism and
influence. Finding literature just arising, and the dispute still raging
between the Saxon and Swiss schools, whether it should model itself after
reason and form like the French literature, or after nature and the soul
like the English, (28) he showed the true mode of uniting the two by
turning attention to Greek models; and, in conjunction with Nicholai and
the Jewish philosopher Mendelssohn, established a critical periodical,
which became the agency for a literary reformation. But the point of
interest, in relation to our present subject, is his influence on
religion. Availing himself of the right which his position as librarian of
Wolfenbuettel, a small town near Brunswick, gave him to publish manuscripts
found in the library, he edited, in 1774 and the four following years,
several fragments of a larger work, which he professed to hav