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 world. The theology of Lessing’s coadjutors however, if not also that of Lessing himself, did not rise higher than that of the more serious among the English deists.(702) The other tendency, more decidedly sceptical even than that of Lessing, gave definite form to the extreme sceptical opinions excited by French philosophy, which had been fermenting in German society, and had earlier expressed themselves. It is best represented by Edelmann,(703) and by the unhappy Bahrdt, who passed gradually from Semler’s school into this. Its religions tenets were simple naturalism, moral as distinct from positive religion; and it was connected with the attempt by Basedow,(704) patronised by Frederick, to establish educational institutions on the model proposed in Rousseau’s Emile. The name which it gave to the movement was, the Period of Enlightenment (Aufklärung-zeit),(705) which expressed the consciousness of illumination, and the yearning for deliverance which was finding its expression in France; and this name therefore has been usually adopted among foreign writers to describe this period of the history.