For over a thousand years it was held in the Church,
"always, everywhere, and by all," that there could not be human
beings on the opposite sides of the earth, even if the earth had
opposite sides; and, when attacked by gainsayers, the great mass of
true believers, from the fourth century to the fifteenth, simply
used that opiate which had so soothing an effect on John Henry
Newman in the nineteenth century--_securus judicat orbis terrarum_.
Yet gainsayers still appeared. That the doctrine of the antipodes
continued to have life, is shown by the fact that in the sixth
century Procopius of Gaza attacks it with a tremendous argument. He
declares that, if there be men on the other side of the earth, Christ
must have gone there and suffered a second time to save them; and,
therefore, that there must have been there, as necessary preliminaries
to his coming, a duplicate Eden, Adam, serpent, and deluge.
Cosmas Indicopleustes also attacked the doctrine with especial
bitterness, citing a passage from St.
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