cated a purpose of
driving him from his bishopric. Whether this purpose was carried out or
not, the old theological view, by virtue of the Pope's divinely ordered
and protected "inerrancy," was re-established, and the doctrine that
the earth has inhabitants on but one of its sides became more than ever
orthodox, and precious in the mind of the Church.(34)

(34) For Virgil of Salzburg, see Neander's History of the Christian
Church, Torrey's translation, vol. iii, p. 63; also Herzog,
Real-Encyklopadie, etc., recent edition by Prof. Hauck, s. v. Virgilius;
also Kretschmer, pp. 56-58; also Whewell, vol. i, p. 197; also De
Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes, pp. 24-26. For very full notes as to pagan
and Christian advocates of the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth
and of the antipodes, and for extract from Zachary's letter, see Migne,
Patrologia, vol. vi, p. 426, and vol. xli, p. 487. For St. Boniface's
part, see Bonifacii Epistolae, ed. Giles, i, 173. Berger de Xivrey,
Traditions Teratologiques, pp. 186-188, makes a curious attempt to show
that Pope Zachary denounced the wrong man; that the real offender was
a Roman poet--in the sixth book of the Aeneid and the first book of the
Georgics.

This decision seems to have been regarded as final, and five centuries
later the great encyclopedist of the Middle Ages, Vincent of Beauvais,
though he accepts the sphericity of the earth, treats the doctrine
of the antipodes as disproved, because contrary to Scripture. Yet the
doctrine still lived. Just as it had been previously revived by William
of Conches and then laid to rest, so now it is somewhat timidly brought
out in the thirteenth century by no less a personage than Albert the
Great, the most noted man of science in that time. But his utterances
are perhaps purposely obscure. Again it disappears beneath the
theological wave, and a hundred years later Nicolas d'Oresme, geographer
of the King of France, a light of science, is forced to yield to the
clear teaching of the Scripture as cited by St. Augustine.

Nor was this the worst. In Italy, at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, the Church thought it necessary to deal with questions of this
sort by rack and fagot. In 1316 Peter of Abano, famous as a physician,
having promulgated this with other obnoxious doctrines in science, only
escaped the Inquisition by death; and in 1327 Cecco d'Ascoli, noted as
an astronomer, was for this and other results of thought, which br