tles taught doctrines of such nature and by such method as were
compatible with the peculiarities of their condition. They adapted
themselves to the barbarism and coexistent prejudices of the people; and
hence we can only reconcile much that they taught by their disposition
to cater to the corrupt taste of their time. The Jews already possessed
many notions which it would not be policy in Christ to annihilate;
hence, said Semler, he reclothed them, and gave them a slight admixture
of truth. Thus he reduced Christ's utterances concerning angels, the
second coming of the Messiah, the last Judgment, demons, resurrection of
the dead, and inspiration of the Scripture, to so many _accommodations_
to prevailing errors. Semler had some indistinct faith in these revealed
truths, but the stress which Christ laid upon them was, in his opinion,
a mere stroke of policy. This theory he had been maturing for some time,
and he first made it public in the preface to his _Paraphrase of the
Epistle to the Romans_.

Another distinction which Semler drew in connection with his new method
of criticism, and somewhat allied to the details of his
accommodation-theory, was between the local and temporary, the permanent
and eternal, in the Scriptures. A large portion of the Bible, he held,
is only ephemeral, and was never intended to be anything else. There was
a local interest in the accounts of the writers; but after the change of
government, or the lapse of a generation or two, they had no further
application to mankind. Nor do they now meet the wants of the world;
they are only the obsolete machinery of a superseded civilization.
Semler bitterly complained of Ernesti by charging him with failing to
fix the time and locality of the circumstances of the Scriptures. A few
specimens will show how the latter strove to meet the great want. The
coming of our Lord Jesus, 1 Cor. i. 7, is only the dawn of a temporal
kingdom; "Christ is a stumbling-block to the Jews," because he would not
throw off the Roman yoke as his countrymen had fondly hoped; the
Apostle's determination "to know nothing but Jesus Christ crucified,"
meant that he knew nothing whatever of the second coming of Christ; "the
Spirit searching the deep things of God" leads us to know that we can
understand the dark things of the Prophets; "the creature which is made
subject to vanity" is the Roman world still pursuing its idolatry; the
demoniacs are mad men whom it was only necessary to b