The method was at first rejected with contumely. Irenæus and Tertullian bring to bear upon it their batteries of irony and denunciation. It was a blasphemous invention. It was one of the arts of spiritual wickedness against which a Christian must wrestle. But it was deep-seated in the habits of the time; and even while Tertullian was writing, it was establishing a lodgment inside the Christian communities which it has never ceased to hold. It did so first of all in the great school of Alexandria, in which it had grown up as the reconciliation of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology. The methods of the school of Philo were applied to the New Testament even more than to the Old. When Christ said, “The foxes have holes, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head,” he meant that on the believer alone, who is separated from the rest, that is from the wild beasts of the world, rests the Head of the universe, the kind and gentle Word.[126] When he is said to have fed the multitude on five barley-loaves and two fishes, it is meant that he gave mankind the preparatory training of the Law, for barley, like the Law, ripens sooner than wheat, and of philosophy, which had grown, like fishes, in the waves of the Gentile world.[127] When we read of the anointing of Christ’s feet, we read of both his teaching and his passion; for the feet are a symbol of divine instruction travelling to the ends of the earth, or, it may be, of the Apostles who so travelled, having received the fragrant unction of the Holy Ghost; and the ointment, which is adulterated oil, is a symbol of the traitor Judas, “by whom the Lord was anointed on the feet, being released from his sojourn in the world: for the dead are anointed.”[128]