human
clergy to put religion on a common-sense footing. His personal animosity to Voltaire and to Frederick would also influence him; but he repugned even the decorous
gpt
of the theologians of his own country. When his brother wrote him to the effect that the basis of the current religion was false, and the structure the work of shallow bunglers, he replied that he admitted the falsity of the basis, but not the incompetence of those who built up the system, in which he saw much skill and address. Shallow bunglers, on the other hand, he termed the schemers of the new system of compromise and accommodation. [1363] In short, as he avowed in his fragment on Bibliolatry, he was always
human
in his thought on the problem of religion. [1364] For himself, he framed (or perhaps adopted) [1365] a pseudo-theory of the Education of the Human Race (1780), which has served the semi-rationalistic clergy of our own day in good stead; and adapted Rousseau's catching doctrine that the true test of religion lies in feeling and not in argument. [1366] Neither doctrine, in short, has a whit more philosophical value than the other
gpt
of the time, and neither was fitted to have much immediate influence; but both pointed a way to the more philosophic apologists of religion, while baulking the orthodox. [1367] If all this were more than a piece of defensive strategy, it was no more scientific than the semi-rationalist theology which he contemned. The
human
theorem, on its merits, is indeed a discreditable paralogism; and only our knowledge of his affectional bias can withhold us from counting it a mystification. On analysis it is found to have no logical content whatever.
gpt
Christianity Lessing made out to be a
human
independent of its pseudo-historical setting; thus giving to the totality of the admittedly false tradition the credit of an ethic which in the terms of the case is simply human, and in all essentials demonstrably pre-Christian. His propaganda of this kind squares ill with his paper on The Origin of Revealed Religion, written about 1860. There he professes to hold by a naturalist view of religion. All
gpt
or dogmatic creeds he ascribes to the arrangements that men from time to time found it necessary to make as to the means of applying
human
religion.
gpt
Hence all positive and revealed religions are alike true and alike false; alike true, inasmuch as it has everywhere been necessary to come to terms over different things in order to secure agreement and unity in the public religion; alike false, inasmuch as that over which men came to terms does not so much stand close to the essential (nicht sowohl ... neben dem Wesentlichen besteht), but rather weakens and oppresses it. The best revealed or positive religion is that which contains the fewest conventional additions to natural religion; that which least limits the effects of natural religion. [1368] This is the position of Tindal and the English deists in general; and it seems to have been in this mood that Lessing wrote to Mendelssohn about being able to
human
[1369] On the historical side, too, he had early convinced himself that Christianity was established and propagated