12 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



the whole face of the earth " one face, not two faces ! 

 The theory of an antipodal world, shut off by an impass- 

 able tropic sea, implied the existence of a race of men 

 who had not died in Adam, and who had not in Christ 

 been made alive. The inventions of the Greeks were 

 " old wives' tales," but they were something worse. " The 

 blasphemous theory of the Antipodes makes Christ a 

 liar, and His word not in us." 



Cosmas thought highly of the vigour of his own mental 

 powers, and he had, at all events, a pleasant freshness of 

 invective and a good gift of laughter at obvious absurdity. 

 But he was, . in truth, rather a representative man than 

 a leader of thought. Most of his ideas, as Professor Beazley 

 has shown, had been expressed by earlier writprs : the 

 flat, quadrilateral earth : the rivers of Eden that dive 

 under the sea : the world-tabernacle of two storeys : 

 the gluing together of earth and heaven : the absurdity 

 and the blasphemy of an antipodal world. Long before 

 Cosmas, Lactantius had asked the triumphant question : 

 " Can anyone be so foolish as to believe that there 

 are men whose feet are higher than their heads, or places 

 where things can be hanging upwards, trees growing 

 downwards, and water falling upwards ? " He who 

 begins by believing Ptolemy, another famous Father 

 had said, ends by denying God as Creator. " Can one 

 imagine," asks St. Augustine, "anything more absurd 

 than that which the ancients have maintained, that 

 there may be inhabitants in the regions of earth opposite 

 to ours ? Those who have said this admit that they 

 have no knowledge by experience. It is mere con- 

 jecture drawn from certain pretended philosophical 

 arguments. But, assuming their propositions are correct, 

 can we argue that, because these lands are inhabitable, 

 therefore they are inhabited ? The Holy Scripture, 

 which is the rule of that which we should believe, says 

 no word about them. It is agreed that the descendants 

 of our first father could not have come to those lands. 

 How then can it be maintained that there are men 

 there ? " 



