SLEEP AND AWAKENING 
ii 
world, that was most obnoxious to the Christian Fathers. 
From the theological point of view belief in the existence 
of vast inaccessible lands inhabited by millions of people 
raised exactly the same difficulties as in the case of belief 
in the other planets being also inhabited. Were there 
separate Divine revelations to these people, were there 
separate Atonements? 
Thus the Antarctic problem became an element in theo- 
logical controversy. St. Augustine met the difficulty 
in a philosophical spirit by distinguishing between dem- 
onstrated facts and mere speculation and his argument 
is worth quoting in the following translation from De 
Civitate Dei , kindly made by Dr. Sutherland Black: 
“ Further, as touching what they fable, that there are 
antipodes — that is to say, that on the opposite side of the 
Earth, where the sun rises when he sets to us, men plant 
[their] footsteps opposite to our feet — it is by no means 
to be believed. Nor, indeed, do they [v/ho so allege] 
maintain that they have learned this by any historical 
knowledge, but, so to speak, they conjecture it by a pro- 
cess of reasoning [to the effect] that the Earth is sus- 
pended between the vaults of the sky and that the world 
occupies at one and the same time the lowest and the inter- 
mediate position, and from this they form the opinion that 
the other half of the Earth which is below cannot possibly 
be without human inhabitants. But they fail to observe 
that even although the world be believed, or even in some 
sort shown, to be of a rounded and spherical form, it does 
not, therefore, follow that the Earth also in that part is 
free from the accumulation of waters; nor yet even 
should it be thus free, would it forthwith follow of neces- 
sity that it should be peopled. For in no way does the 
scripture lie which when it relates the past produces 
