To the great minds which Germany produced in the eighteenth century belongs Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was the first free-thinking man in Germany, probably more so than the royal hero Frederick, who had indeed liberated himself from bigotry, but still had idols to whom he sacrificed. With his gigantic mind, Lessing burst through all bounds and regulations which depraved taste, dry-as-dust science, haughty orthodoxy, and pedantry of every kind had desired to set up and perpetuate. The freedom that Lessing brought to the Germans was more solid and permanent than that which Voltaire aroused in depraved French society with his biting sarcasm; for, his purpose was to ennoble, and his wit was only a means to this end. Lessing wished to exalt the theatre to a pulpit, and art to a religion. Voltaire degraded philosophy into light gossip for the drawing-room. It was an important moment for the history of the Jews, when these two young men, Mendelssohn and Lessing, became acquainted. It is related that a passionate lover of chess, named Isaac Hess, brought them together at the chess-board (1754). The royal game united two monarchs in the kingdom of thought. Lessing, the son of a pastor, was of a democratic nature: he sought the society of outcasts, and those despised by public opinion. As shortly before he had mixed with actors in Leipsic, and as afterwards he associated with soldiers in Breslau, so now he was not ashamed to converse in Berlin with despised Jews. He had before this dedicated the first-fruits of his art, which to him appeared the highest art, to the pariah nation. By his drama, "The Jews," he desired to show that a Jew can be unselfish and noble, and he thereby aroused the displeasure of cultivated Christian circles. The ideal of a noble Jew which Lessing had in mind while composing this drama, he saw realized in Mendelssohn, and it must have pleased him to find that he was not mistaken in his portraiture, and that reality did not disprove his dream.