He had the acuteness to see that Lessing's
refutation of deism did not make him a Christian, while the new
views proposed as a substitute for those of Reimarus were such as
Goetze and his age could in no wise comprehend.
Lessing's own views of dogmatic religion are to be found in his
work entitled, "The Education of the Human Race." These views
have since so far become the veriest commonplaces of criticism,
that one can hardly realize that, only ninety years ago, they
should have been regarded as dangerous paradoxes. They may be
summed up in the statement that all great religions are good in
their time and place; that, "as there is a soul of goodness in
things evil, so also there is a soul of truth in things
erroneous." According to Lessing, the successive phases of
religious belief constitute epochs in the mental evolution of the
human race. So that the crudest forms of theology, even
fetishism, now to all appearance so utterly revolting, and
polytheism, so completely inadequate, have once been the best,
the natural and inevitable results of man's reasoning powers and
appliances for attaining truth. The mere fact that a system of
religious thought has received the willing allegiance of large
masses of men shows that it must have supplied some consciously
felt want, some moral or intellectual craving.
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