 Herder’s great achievements in this whole area also have something of the character of the early acts of an inexorable personal tragedy, however. As was mentioned, Herder by no means intended his championing of the cause of intellectual conscience in insisting on the autonomy of natural science and interpretation to undermine religion in general or Christianity in particular; on the contrary, his hope and expectation was that both sorts of autonomy would in the end support religion and Christianity. However, this hope has been sorely disappointed. Autonomous natural science has increasingly made religion generally and Christianity in particular look untenable. And Herder’s policy of reading the Bible with the aid of normal interpretive means as a collection of human texts, with all of the foibles of human texts, has increasingly led to an undermining of the Bible’s claims to intellectual authority (a landmark here was the publication of David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus [1835–6]). Much of what Herder has ultimately achieved in this area would therefore have been deeply unwelcome to him.