Lessing could not, of course, accept its standpoint. His idea of revelation, and his conception of the Person of Jesus, were much deeper than those of the Fragmentist. He was a thinker; Reimarus only a historian. But this was the first time that a really historical mind, thoroughly conversant with the sources, had undertaken the criticism of the tradition. It was Lessing’s greatness that he grasped the significance of this criticism, and felt that it must lead either to the destruction or to the re‐casting of the idea of revelation. He recognised that the introduction of the historical element would transform and deepen rationalism. Convinced that the fateful moment had arrived, he disregarded the scruples of Reimarus’s family and the objections of Nicolai and Mendelssohn, and, though inwardly trembling for that which he himself held sacred, he flung the torch with his own hand. Semler, at the close of his refutation of the fragment, ridicules its editor in the following apologue. “A prisoner was once brought before the Lord Mayor of London on a charge of arson. He had been seen coming down from the upper story of the burning house. ‘Yesterday,’ so ran his defence, ‘about four o’clock I went into my neighbour’s store‐room and saw there a burning candle which the servants had carelessly forgotten. In the course of the night it would have burned down, and set fire to the stairs. To make sure that the fire should break out in the day‐time, I threw some straw upon it. The flames burst out at the sky‐light, the fire‐engines came hurrying up, and the fire, which in the night might have been dangerous, was promptly extinguished.’ ‘Why did you not yourself pick up the candle and put it out?’ asked the Lord Mayor. ‘If I had put out the candle the servants would not have learned to be more careful; now that there has been such a fuss about it, they will not be so careless in future.’ ‘Odd, very odd,’ said the Lord Mayor, ‘he is not a criminal, only a little weak in the head.’ So he had him shut up in the mad‐house, and there he lies to this day.” The story is extraordinarily apposite—only that Lessing was not mad; he knew quite well what he was doing. His object was to show how an unseen enemy had pushed his parallels up to the very walls, and to summon to the defence “some one who should be as nearly the ideal defender of religion as the Fragmentist was the ideal assailant.” Once, with prophetic insight into the future, he says: “The Christian traditions must be explained by the inner truth of Christianity, and no written traditions can give it that inner truth, if it does not itself possess it.”