 However, it is arguable that Herder’s most intrinsically valuable contribution to the philosophy of religion concerns the interpretation of the Bible. In this connection, as has already been mentioned, he champions a strict secularism. This was already his position in the 1760s. At that period he argued firmly, in the spirit of Galileo, for disallowing revelation any jurisdiction over natural science—though he did so not in an anti-religious spirit but in the hope and expectation that an autonomous natural science would confirm religion. And he made a parallel case for the autonomy of interpretation: Religious assumptions and means have no business interfering in the interpretation of texts either, even when the texts are sacred ones. Instead, even the Bible must be interpreted as the work of human beings, and by means of the same sorts of rigorous hermeneutic methods that are employed for interpreting other ancient texts—any religious enlightenment coming as a result of such interpretation, not entering into the process itself. This whole position remained Herder’s considered position in his later period as well.