Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

LESSING'S life has been sketched in the introduction to his "Minna von Barnhelm" in the volume of Continental Dramas in The Harvard Classics.

"The Education of the Human Race" is the culmination of a bitter theological controversy which began with the publication by Lessing, in 1774-1778, of a series of fragments of a work on natural religion by the German deist, Reimarus. This action brought upon Lessing the wrath of the orthodox German Protestants, led by J. M. Goeze, and in the battle that followed Lessing did his great work for the liberalizing of religious thought in Germany. The present treatise is an extraordinarily condensed statement of the author's attitude towards the fundamental questions of religion, and gives his view of the signification of the previous religious history of mankind, along with his faith and hope for the future.

As originally issued, the essay purported to be merely edited by Lessing; but there is no longer any doubt as to his having been its author. It is an admirable and characteristic expression of the serious and elevated spirit in which he dealt with matters that had then, as often, been degraded by the virulence of controversy.

THE EDUCATION OF THE

HUMAN RACE

I

HAT which Education is to the Individual, Revelation is to the Race.

TH

2

Education is Revelation coming to the Individual Man; and Revelation is Education which has come, and is yet coming, to the Human Race.

3

Whether it can be of any advantage to the science of instruction to contemplate Education in this point of view, I will not here inquire; but in Theology it may unquestionably be of great advantage, and may remove many difficulties, if Revelation be conceived of as the Educator of Humanity.

4

Education gives to Man nothing which he might not educe out of himself; it gives him that which he might educe out of himself, only quicker and more easily. In the same way too, Revelation gives nothing to the human species, which the human reason left to itself might not attain; only it has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things earlier.

5

And just as in Education, it is not a matter of indifference in what order the powers of a man are developed, es it cannot impart to a man all at once; so was God also

necessitated to maintain a certain order, and a certain measure in His Revelation.

6

Even if the first man were furnished at once with a conception of the One God; yet it was not possible that this conception, imparted, and not gained by thought, should subsist long in its clearness. As soon as the Human Reason, left to itself, began to elaborate it, it broke up the one Immeasurable into many Measurables, and gave a note or sign of mark to every one of these parts.

7

And

Hence naturally arose polytheism and idolatry. who can say how many millions of years human reason would have been bewildered in these errors, even though in all places and times there were individual men who recognized them as errors, had it not pleased God to afford it a better direction by means of a new Impulse?

8

But when He neither could nor would reveal Himself any more to each individual man, He selected an individual People for His special education; and that exactly the most rude and the most unruly, in order to begin with it from the very commencement.

9

This was the Hebrew People, respecting whom we do not in the least know what kind of Divine Worship they had in Egypt. For so despised a race of slaves was not permitted to take part in the worship of the Egyptians; and the God of their fathers was entirely unknown to them.

ΙΟ

It is possible that the Egyptians had expressly prohibited the Hebrews from having a God or Gods, perhaps they had forced upon them the belief that their despised race had no God, no Gods, that to have a God or Gods was the prerogative of the superior Egyptians only, and this may

« AnteriorContinuar »