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Lucretius, and Plutarch among the latter. Thus the problem came into the early Church unsolved. Among the first churchmen to take it up was, in the East, St. Gregory Nazianzen, who showed that to sail beyond Gibraltar was impossible; and, in the West, Lactantius, who asked: "Is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads?... that the crops and trees grow downward?... that the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth?... I am at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once erred, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one vain thing by another." In all this contention by Gregory and Lactantius there was nothing to be especially regretted, for, whatever their motive, they simply supported their inherited belief on grounds of natural law and probability. Unfortunately, the discussion was not long allowed to rest on these scientific and philosophical grounds; other Christian thinkers followed, who in their ardour adduced texts of Scripture, and soon the question had become theological; hostility to the belief in antipodes became dogmatic. 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