that the crops and trees grow downward?... that the rains and
snow and hail fall upward toward the earth?... I am at a loss what to
say of those who, when they have once erred, steadily persevere in their
folly and defend one vain thing by another."

In all this contention by Gregory and Lactantius there was nothing to be
especially regretted, for, whatever their motive, they simply supported
their inherited belief on grounds of natural law and probability.

Unfortunately, the discussion was not long allowed to rest on these
scientific and philosophical grounds; other Christian thinkers followed,
who in their ardour adduced texts of Scripture, and soon the question
had become theological; hostility to the belief in antipodes became
dogmatic. The universal Church was arrayed against it, and in front of
the vast phalanx stood, to a man, the fathers.

To all of them this idea seemed dangerous; to most of them it seemed
damnable. St. Basil and St. Ambrose were tolerant enough to allow that
a man might be saved who thought the earth inhabited on its opposite
sides; but the great majority of the fathers doubted the possibility of
salvation to such misbelievers. The great champion of the orthodox view
was St. Augustine. Though he seemed inclined to yield a little in regard
to the sphericity of the earth, he fought the idea that men exist on the
other side of it, saying that "Scripture speaks of no such descendants
of Adam," he insists that men could not be allowed by the Almighty to
live there, since if they did they could not see Christ at His second
coming descending through the air. But his most cogent appeal, one which
we find echoed from theologian to theologian during a thousand years
afterward, is to the nineteenth Psalm, and to its confirmation in the
Epistle to the Romans; to the words, "Their line is gone out through
all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." He dwells with
great force on the fact that St. Paul based one of his most powerful
arguments upon this declaration regarding the preachers of the gospel,
and that he declared even more explicitly that "Verily, their sound
went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world."
Thenceforth we find it constantly declared that, as those preachers
did not go to the antipodes, no antipodes can exist; and hence that the
supporters of this geographical doctrine "give the lie direct to King
David and to St. Paul, and therefore to the Holy G