Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings

Against Pastor Goeze of Hamburg

Brunswick, 1778

This sheet – or however many sheets there may be – which I sit down to write is likely to prove a laborious task, because I scarcely know for whom I am writing. I only know against whom, and I have so little hope that it will also be for the person against whom it is directed that I scarcely dare transform this hope into a wish.

With reference to a passage that I am conscious of having written with deliberation and good intentions, Herr Pastor Goeze of Hamburg has made, and published in two different newspapers, certain remarks which label me rather as an opponent of the Christian religion.

I will not repeat here that passage as I wrote it. There is all the less need to do so since I wish to rearrange its individual sentences, which I allegedly ‘set down like simple axioms’, in a somewhat different order. Perhaps this minor change alone will enable my opponent to understand me better, especially when he finds that his own objections have helped me to explain myself more adequately. Perhaps this minor change alone will enable my sentences fully to achieve that status [of axioms] which they had not yet attained.