Until some lucky discovery gives us the text of Marcion’s _Antitheses_ it is difficult to say whether he has been correctly reported by his adversaries, or whether, which is probable enough, they have suppressed evidence brought forward by him in support of these erasures and interpolations. That in putting them forward, he did so in such a way as to leave many an opening to a skilled controversialist is easy to believe, and there are many passages in Tertullian’s refutation which show that his forensically-trained adversary took advantage of these with more eagerness than generosity. But the noteworthy thing about the long drawn out dialectic of Tertullian’s treatise _Against Marcion_, is the way in which Marcion throughout resolutely abstains from any of the allegorical or figurative interpolations of Scripture which we have seen so prevalent among all the Gnostic writers from Simon Magus down to the authors of the _Pistis Sophia_ and its connected texts. Everywhere, it would seem, he took the Biblical texts that he quotes at their literal meaning and never seems to have attempted to translate any of them by trope or figure. In like manner, we find him, so far as his adversaries’ account goes, entirely free from that preoccupation concerning the divisions and order of the spiritual world which plays so large a part in the speculations of the systems hitherto described. Nor does he show any tendency to the deification of abstract ideas which is really at the root of all Gnostic systems whether before or after Christ. Nowhere does Marcion let fall an expression which could make us think of the Sophia or Wisdom of God as a separate entity or personified being, nor is the Logos of Plato and his Alexandrian admirers ever alluded to by him. Hence, he in no way contributes to the growth, so luxuriant in his time, of mythology and allegory[736]. In everything he exhibits the hard and unimaginative quality of the practical man.