With such opinions as these, expressed in great clearness and conciseness, who can fail to perceive that their tendency was to overthrow the traditional faith of the church in large portions of the Bible? Who is to be the judge of what is to be retained and what rejected? Indeed, if Lessing be right, the entire Scripture record might be abolished without doing violence to religion. The effect of his writings was decidedly skeptical. His view of Christianity was merely aesthetical, and only so far as the Bible was an agent of popular elevation, did he seem to consider it valuable. He did not dispute the facts of Scripture history because of the various accounts given of them by the inspired writers. Variety of testimony was no ground for the total overthrow of the thing testified. He retained the history of the resurrection in spite of the different versions of it. "Who," he asks, "has ever ventured to draw the same inference in profane history? If Livy, Polybius, Dionysius, and Tacitus relate the very same event, it may be the very same battle, the very same siege, each one differing so much in the details that those of the one completely give the lie to those of the other, has any one, for that reason, ever denied the event itself in which they agree?" We may examine the entire circle of Lessing's literary productions, and we shall see, scattered here and there through them, sentiments which, taken singly, would have a very beneficial effect upon the popular faith in inspiration and the historical testimony of the Scriptures. But, unhappily, these were overshadowed by others of a conflicting nature, and though he did not array himself as a champion of Rationalism, he proved himself one of the strongest promoters of its reign. He considered his age torpid and sluggish. It was his desire to awaken it. And he did succeed in giving to the chaotic times in which he lived that literary direction which we now look back upon as the starting-point of recent German literature. The chief evil that he inflicted was due to the position in which he placed himself as the combatant of the avowed friends of inspiration. He was honest in his love of truth, but he loved the search for it more than the attainment. The key to his whole life may be found in his own words: "If God should hold in his right hand all truth, and in his left the ever-active impulse and love of search after truth, although accompanied with the condition that I should ever err, and should say, 'Choose!' I would choose the left with humility, and say, 'Give, Father! Pure truth belongs to thee alone!'" The revolution which Lessing wrought in literature was only equaled by that achieved by Kant in the domain of philosophy.