3. The method had opponents even in Alexandria itself. Origen[139] more than once speaks of those who objected to his “digging wells below the surface;” and Eusebius mentions a lost work of the learned Nepos of Arsinoê, entitled “A Refutation of the Allegorists.”[140] But it found its chief antagonist in the school of interpretation which arose at the end of the fourth century at Antioch. The dominant philosophy of Alexandria had been a fusion of Platonism with some elements of both Stoicism and revived Pythagoreanism: that of Antioch was coming to be Aristotelianism. The one was idealistic, the other realistic: the one was a philosophy of dreams and mystery, the other of logic and system: to the one, Revelation was but the earthy foothold from which speculation might soar into infinite space; to the other, it was “a positive fact given in the light of history.”[141] Allegorical interpretation was the outcome of the one; literal interpretation of the other. The precursor of the Antiochene school, Julius Africanus, of Emmaus, has left behind a letter which has been said “to contain in its two short pages more true exegesis than all the commentaries and homilies of Origen.”[142] The chief founder of the school was Lucian, a scholar who shares with Origen the honour of being the founder of Biblical philology, and whose lifetime, which was cut short by martyrdom in 311, just preceded the great Trinitarian controversies of the Nicene period. His disciples came to be leaders on the Arian side: among them were Eusebius of Nicomedia and Arius himself. The question of exegesis became entangled with the question of orthodoxy. The greatest of Greek interpreters, Theodore of Mopsuestia, followed, a hundred years afterwards, in the same path; but in his day also questions of canons of interpretation were so entangled with questions of Christology, and the Christology of the Antiochene school was so completely outvoted at the great ecclesiastical assemblies by the Christology of the Alexandrian school, that his reputation for scholarship has been almost wholly obscured by the ill-fame of his leanings towards Nestorianism. It has been one of the many results of the controversies into which the metaphysical tendencies of the Greeks led the churches of the fourth and fifth centuries, to postpone almost to modern times the acceptance of “the literal grammatical and historical sense” as the true sense of Scripture. * * * * *