ZACHARY. (Ignorance of Pope.)

Pope Zachary ordered Virgil, bishop of Saltzburg, in the eighth century, to be excommunicated and degraded from his priesthood, if, by his confession, he was convicted of having taught that there was another world, and other men under the earth, another sun and another moon. I am not ignorant that the

doctrine for which he would have this bishop to be condemned, was not the bare hypothesis of the Antipodes, for it doth not suppose any different stars from those which appear in our horizon; but yet this doctrine of the Antipodes plainly appears to be one of those which he judged worthy of the most rigorous punishments of the canon law. Was not this a prodigious ignorance? Was it not an enormous abuse of the power of the keys? I am willing to believe that Boniface imposed upon the pope, and that he falsely represented Virgil’s opinions. They had for some time been embroiled in a quarrel, in which the jealousy of learning and authority had engaged them, which made Boniface take a wrong view of Virgil’s opinions. And who knows whether he did not give a malicious turn to the fact, by annexing several consequences which he thought proper to excite fears. Some will have it that he suffered himself to be deceived by false reports, and that he judged of Virgil’s sentiments from whatever was said of them by ignorant relaters, who could not comprehend them. This is the learned Velserus’s charitable conjecture. “I cannot but approve the conjecture of some, viz. that Virgil treated of the figure of the earth in a manner that was too subtle for the comprehension of the vulgar, when he asserted that it was round, and that there were inhabitants on the other side of it, directly opposite to us, to whom we give the name of Antipodes, and that these were visited by the sun and moon no less than we. This, through the ignorance of the hearers, being ill understood, and represented in a quite different light to Boniface, gave the first grounds of offence.” But this doth not at all excuse this archbishop; his ignorance, his precipitation, his temerity in accusing the innocent at the court of Rome are undeniable facts.—Art. Virgil of Saltzburg.