But Ernesti’s work suffices to show that the undogmatic philological method did not in itself lead to any [pg 004] result. Its author is in reality by no means free from dogmatic prepossessions, but he skilfully avoids those questions which would bring him into conflict with Church doctrine. In fact the use he makes of philology is more or less formal. He does not venture to treat the books of the New Testament without prepossession as witnesses from the literature of a distant period, and to show the peculiar mould in which Christian ideas are there cast in comparison with subsequent periods and with the period for which he writes. He did not realise that the undogmatic, philological method of exegesis must logically lead to a method in which philology is the handmaid of historical criticism. His great contemporary, Johann Salomo Semler, ventures to give expression to this truth, and so becomes the creator of historical theology. In his theoretical works on the Scriptures and on exegesis—“Introduction to theological Hermeneutics” (1760-1769),_(_7_)_ “Essay on the free Investigation of the Canon” (1771-1775),_(_8_)_ “A new attempt to promote a generally profitable Exposition and Application of the New Testament” (1786)_(_9_)_—the Halle professor explains again and again what is to be understood by a “historical” method of exegesis. He demands that the New Testament shall be regarded as a temporally conditioned expression of Christian thought, and examined with an unprejudiced eye. In making this claim he does not speak as a [pg 005] disinterested representative of historical science, but makes it in the name of religion. If religion is to develop progressively and purify itself into an ethical belief, the special embodiments which it has received in the past must not lay the embargo of a false authority upon its progress. We must acknowledge to ourselves that many conceptions and arguments, not only of the Old Testament but also of the New, have not the same significance for us as they had for the early days of Christianity. In his work of 1786, Semler even demands that “for present day Christians there should be made a generally useful selection from the discourses of Jesus and the writings of the Apostles, in which the local reference to contemporary readers shall be distinguished or eliminated.”