Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/153

 ancient Greeks, especially the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle, had evolved theories of the earth's sphericity, which, while vague, were basic for subsequent accurate ideas that developed later.

When Christianity sprang into existence Eusebius, St. John Chrysostom, and Cosmos evolved a complete description of the earth. They considered the earth as a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas, as a kind of house, with heaven as its upper story and the earth as its ground floor. To the north of the earth was a great mountain; at night the sun was pushed into a pit and pulled out again in the morning, with heaven as a loft and hell as a cellar. In the Atlantic Ocean, at some unknown distance from Europe, was one of the openings into hell, into which a ship sailing to this point, would tumble. The terror of this conception was one of the chief obstacles of the great voyage of Columbus. Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and Zwingli held to the opinion that a great firmament, or floor, separated the heavens from the earth; that above it were the waters and angels, and below it, the earth and man.

During the time that the sphericity of the earth was still undecided, another question arose that was considered of far greater importance, namely, the conception of the antipodes and the problem of deciding whether human beings existed on the earth's opposite side. It

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