finding himself at home in foreign interests and
ideas, the Rationalistic Theologians who had outgrown Pietism and passed
through the school of the English Deists and of Wolf, no longer
possessed the first, a knowledge of the subject, to the same extent as
some scholars of the earlier generation. The second, free criticism,
they possessed in the high degree guaranteed by the conviction of having
a rational religion; the third, the power of comprehension, only in a
very limited measure. They had lost the idea of positive religion, and
with it a living and just conception of the history of religion.

In the history of thought there is always need for an apparently
disproportionate expenditure of power, in order to produce an advance in
the development. And it would appear as if a certain self-satisfied
narrow-mindedness within the progressing ideas of the present, as well
as a great measure of inability even to understand the past and
recognise its own dependence on it, must make its appearance, in order
that a whole generation may be freed from the burden of the past. It
needed the absolute certainty which Rationalism had found in the
religious philosophy of the age, to give sufficient courage to subject
to historical criticism the central dogmas on which the Protestant
system as well as the Catholic finally rests, the dogmas of the canon
and inspiration on the one hand, and of the Trinity and Christology on
the other. The work of Lessing in this respect had no great results. We
to-day see in his theological writings the most important contribution
to the understanding of the earliest history of dogma, which that period
supplies; but we also understand why its results were then so trifling.
This was due, not only to the fact that Lessing was no theologian by
profession, or that his historical observations were couched in
aphorisms, but because like Leibnitz and Mosheim, he had a capacity for
appreciating the history of religion which forbade him to do violence to
that history or to sit in judgment on it, and because his philosophy in
its bearings on the case allowed him to seek no more from his materials
than an assured understanding of them, in a word again, because he was
no theologian. The Rationalists, on the other hand, who within certain
limits were no less his opponents than the orthodox, derived the
strength of their opposition to the systems of dogma, as the Apologists
of the second century had already done with