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.
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