LESSING'S THEOLOGICAL CONCLUSIONS. Lessing refused to surrender Christianity, on proof of error in its first teachers, uncertainty in its reported miracles, contradictions in its early literature, misapplication of Messianic prophecies. All these he regards as but the external accidents, the transitory media, of the religion, constituting, it may be, its support in one age and its weakness in another. They do not belong to its inner essence, in which alone the real evidence of spiritual truth is found; and he who detects anything amiss with them may even render a service by driving men from sham-proofs, that really persuade no one, to true ones that lie at the heart of things. Religious doctrine cannot be deduced from mere historical facts without a μεταβασις εις αλλο γενος vitiating the whole process. _Facts_ indeed _may_ become the proper ground of moral and spiritual faith; but then they must be facts which come over again and again, and betray an element that is permanent and eternal; which form part of the experience and consciousness of humanity; and ally themselves with the Divine by not losing their _presence_ in the world. But _unrepeated facts_, which limit themselves to a moment, which are the incidents of a single personality, and are left behind quite insulated in the past, show--were it only by your not expecting them again--that they are detached from the persistent and essential life of the universe and humanity. They are but once and away; and least of all, therefore, can testify of the untransitory and ever-living. The real can teach us only so far as it has an ideal kernel, redeeming it from the character of a solitary phenomenon. Among the various expositions and applications of this favorite theme of Lessing's, we select the following sentences from his Axiomata. 1. "The Bible evidently contains more than belongs to Religion." 2. "That in this '_more_' the Bible is still infallible, is mere hypothesis." 3. "The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not the Religion." 4. "The objections therefore against the letter and against the Bible, are not on that account objections against the spirit and against the Religion." 5. "Moreover there was a religion ere there was a Bible." 6. "Christianity was in being before Evangelists and Apostles had written. Some time elapsed before the first of them wrote, and a very considerable time before the whole canon was constituted." 7. "However much, therefore, may depend on these writings, it is impossible that the whole truth of the Christian religion can rest upon them." 8. "If there was a period during which, diffused as the Christian religion already was, and many as were the souls filled already with its power, still not a letter had yet been written of the records which have come down to us; then it must be also possible for all the writings of Evangelists and Apostles to perish, yet the religion taught by them still to subsist."