Lessing shares with the deistic Illumination the belief in a religion of reason, whose basis and essential content are formed by morality; but he rises far above this level in that he regards the religion of reason not as the beginning but as the goal of the development, and the positive religions as necessary transition stages in its attainment.  As natural religion differs in each individual according to his feelings and powers, without positive enactments there would be no unity and community in religious matters.  Nevertheless the statutory and historical element is not a graft from without, but a shell organically grown around natural religion, indispensable for its development, and to be removed but gradually and by layers—­when the inclosed kernel has become ripe and firm.  The history of religions is an education of the human race through divine revelation; so teaches his small but thoughtful treatise of 1780.[1] As the education of the individual man puts nothing extraneous into him, but only gives him more quickly and easily that which he could have reached of himself, so human reason is illuminated by revelation concerning things to which it could have itself attained, only that without God’s help the process would have been longer and more difficult—­perhaps it would have wandered about for many millions of years in the errors of polytheism, if God had not been pleased by a single stroke (his revelation to Moses) to give it a better direction.  And as the teacher does not impart everything to the pupil at once, but considers the state of development reached by him at each given period, so God in his revelation observes a certain order and measure.  To the rude Jewish people he revealed himself first as a national God, as the God of their fathers; they had to wait for the Persians to teach them that the God whom they had hitherto worshiped as the most powerful among other gods was the only one.  Although this lowest stage in the development of religion lacked the belief in immortality, yet it must not be lightly valued; let us acknowledge that it was an heroic obedience for men to observe the laws of God simply because they are the laws of God, and not because of temporal or future rewards!  The first practical teacher of immortality was Christ; with him the second age of religion begins:  the first good book of elementary instruction, the Old Testament, from which man had hitherto learned, was followed by the second, better one, the New Testament.  As we now can dispense with the first primer in regard to the doctrine of the unity of God, and as we gradually begin to be able to dispense with the second in regard to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, so this New Testament may easily contain still further truths, which for the present we wonder at as revelations, until the reason shall learn to derive them from other truths already established.  Lessing himself makes an attempt at a philosophical interpretation of the