e found. They
are usually called the Wolfenbuettel fragments. (29) Till recently their
authorship remained a secret. They are now known to have been written by
the learned Hamburg philosopher, Reimarus.(695) They treated very nearly
the same subjects, and in much the same tone, but with consummate skill,
as the English deists. Reimarus, as is now known, in the introduction(696)
to the larger unprinted work from which they were extracted, gave his own
intellectual history, his early doubts on the doctrines of the Trinity,
and the destruction of the heathen; and also on the history of the Old and
New Testaments; and ends, like the English deists, with resting in natural
religion.

The first two(697) fragments, published by Lessing, touched only upon the
question of tolerating deists, and on the custom of declaiming against
human reason in the pulpits. The third referred to the impossibility that
all men should be brought to believe revelation on rational evidence. The
fourth and fifth attacked the Old Testament history, such as the passage
of the Red Sea. The sixth directed an assault against the New Testament;
pointing out with unsparing severity the discrepancies in the accounts of
the resurrection. The concluding one was on the object of Christianity, in
which our blessed Lord's life and work were represented as a defeated
political reform.

These views however were not professedly sanctioned by Lessing, for he
added notes in refutation of them, and stated his object to be merely to
stimulate free inquiry.(698) His wish was gratified in the tremendous
effect which the publication produced. In the literary controversy which
ensued, and which embittered his few remaining days,(699) he explained
himself to be a doubter rather than a disbeliever; and defended himself by
urging the distinctness of the religious element in scripture from the
scientific; asserting that, as Christianity existed before the New
Testament, so it could exist after it. The Christian religion is not true,
he said, merely because evangelists and apostles taught it; but they
taught it because it is true. And in order to restore Christianity to its
true place in the estimation of thinking men, he composed or edited a
well-known work(700) on the Education of the World,(701) which became a
fertile source of thought for the philosophy of history, and was designed
to explain the function of the Jewish religion in reference to the
Christian, and to the wor