Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/597

Rh Under such pressure this scientific truth seems to have disappeared for nearly two hundred years, but by the eighth century the sphericity of the earth had come to be generally accepted among the leaders of thought, and now the doctrine of the antipodes was again asserted by a bishop, Virgil of Salzburg.

There then stood in Germany, in those first years of the eighth century, one of the greatest and noblest of men St. Boniface. His learning was of the best then known. In labors he was a worthy successor of the apostles; his genius for Christian work made him unwillingly primate of Germany; his devotion to duty led him willingly to martyrdom. There sat too, at that time, on the papal throne a great Christian statesman—Pope Zachary. Boniface immediately declared against the revival of such a heresy as the doctrine of the antipodes; he stigmatized it as an assertion that there are men beyond the reach of the appointed means of salvation; he attacked Virgil, and called on Pope Zachary for aid.

The Pope, as the infallible teacher of Christendom, makes a strong response. He cites passages from the book of Job and the Wisdom of Solomon against the doctrine of the antipodes; he declares it "perverse, iniquitous, and against Virgil's own soul," and indicates 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, in the mind of the Church, necessary to salvation.

This decision seems to have been regarded as final, and two centuries later the great encyclopedist of the middle ages,