Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/125

 a New Covenant came into operation, to which both Jews and Heathen were invited. According to this New Covenant, both had only to acknowledge Jesus as the promised Messiah, and were thereby justified; as the Jews had been justified before the death of Jesus by the keeping of the Law. Christianity became a New Testament or Covenant, existing now for the first time, and abolishing the Old Testament or Covenant. Now, indeed, it was necessary that Jesus should become a Jewish Messiah, and be made a son of David, that the prophecies might be fulfilled;—genealogies were discovered, and a history of his birth and of his childhood,—which, however, in both the shapes in which they appear in our canon, strikingly enough contradict each other. I do not say that in Paul, generally, true Christianity is not to be found: when he is not directly engaged with the great problem of his life,—the intercalation of the two systems,—he speaks so justly and so excellently, and knows the True God of Jesus so truly, that we seem to listen to another man altogether. But wherever he treats of his favourite theme, it is as we have stated it above.

The immediate consequence of this Paulinean system;—a system which undertook to remove the objections raised by the disputatious reasonings of the Jews;—(the first principle of which reasonings, i.e. that Judaism was once the True Religion,—which is wholly denied by the Johannean Jesus,—is in the Paulinean system not only not denied but fully asserted:)—I say, that the immediate and necessary consequence of such a system was that it should itself appeal to argumentative reasoning as its judge;—and indeed, since Christianity is addressed to all men,—that it should appeal to the reasoning of all men. And so did Paul in reality;—he reasoned and disputed with the pertinacity of a master; and gloried in having taken captive—i.e. convinced—all minds. Thus the Understanding was already to him the highest Authority, and