Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/159

 the preachers of the gospel and who bring salvation to the gentile, shall come up on Mount Sion to judge the Mount of Esau, which is as much as to say, they shall ascend to the highest climax of the sovereign virtues, from whence they shall announce to the gentiles the true knowledge of their Creator and Redeemer. And thus they shall judge them by condemning and extirpating their errors, and reducing them to the purity of our holy faith. After their conversion also, they shall judge them at the divine tribunal of the sacrament of penitence. The prophet concludes by saying: "And the kingdom shall be the Lord's." For when these Catholic kingdoms shall have drawn to the faith this southern hemisphere and shall have proclaimed and sung this glorious victory, the Redeemer will have made perfect the kingdom of His Church, which now is defective in the greatest part from not having accomplished this grand object. Hence it may be gathered how great a service this will be to the Redeemer, and how blessed will be the prince of this monarchy who shall undertake and complete it. Thus it has been seen that the prophet Obadiah prophecied to the letter the conquest and spiritual possession of the southern hemisphere, through the medium of the preaching of the gospel by the Spanish nation, which has preserved in its integrity the faith of the Redeemer and of His Catholic Church.

Some have asked, as already pointed out, whether the southern hemisphere be not all water, forming, as it were, a great part of the ocean, so as to leave but little of the surface of the earth in it uncovered. The reply to this is, that, according to what we are taught by sacred writ and by philosophical reasoning, there is proportionably as great a surface of land uncovered in the southern hemisphere as in the northern. For the fiat of the Creator, that the waters should be collected into certain hollows of the earth, in order that there should remain uncovered the portion that was necessary for the production of vegetation, as where He says in Genesis