the world; since he alone is free from the Jewish spirit. The general epistles were written solely for the unification of the struggling parties into which the early church had unfortunately split. We now come to the famous _Accommodation-Theory_. Christ and his apostles 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 Nor do they now meet the wants of the world; they are only the obsolete machinery of a superseded civilization.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 bind in order to render perfectly harmless. With such a system of interpretation as this, no one who adopted it could pretend to assign for himself a limit to his skepticism. Whatever defied the critic's acumen or the believer's