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 skylight, 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."
Reimarus takes as his starting-point the question regarding the content of the preaching of Jesus. "We are justified," he says, "in drawing an absolute distinction between the teaching of the Apostles in their writings and what Jesus Himself in His own lifetime proclaimed and taught." What belongs to the preaching of Jesus is clearly to be recognised. It is contained in two phrases of identical meaning, "Repent, and believe the Gospel," or, as it is put elsewhere, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."
The Kingdom of Heaven must however be understood "according to Jewish ways of thought." Neither Jesus nor the Baptist ever explain this expression; therefore they must have been content to have it understood in its known and customary sense. That means that Jesus took His stand within the Jewish religion, and accepted its Messianic expectations without in any way correcting them. If He gives a new development to this religion it is only in so far that He proclaims as near at hand the realisation of ideals and hopes which were alive in thousands of hearts.
There was thus no need for detailed instruction regarding the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven; the catechism and confession of the Church at its commencement consisted of a single phrase. Belief was not difficult: "they need only believe the Gospel, namely that Jesus was about to bring in the Kingdom of God."[1]
- ↑ The quotations inserted without special introduction are, of course, from Reimarus. It is Dr. Schweitzer's method to lead up by a paragraph of exposition to one of these characteristic phrases.—TRANSLATOR.
