“As to the fable that there are antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part which is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.”

“As for the antipodes, the Church Fathers, including Chrysostome, Jerome, Augustine, Theodoretus, Theophilactus, Lactantius, likewise Bede and several others, were unwilling to grant their existence, but contended that this belief was not only contrary to the Holy Scriptures, but also human reason. For just as a house cannot stand without a foundation and a roof, so of necessity, they held, the earth must stand on an immovable foundation and have the sky as a roof. For this reason, they label those who assert that there are antipodes as stupid men who have been deluded by groundless error: in fact, they have condemned them as heretics. We have as an example. Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg, who in 745 AD or thereabouts, was charged with heresy by Bonifacius, Archbishop of Mainz, for no other reason than that he held there were antipodes. Now when this information was transmitted to the King of the Bohemians and thence an appeal was directed to Pope Zaharias, Virgilius was condemned because of his "heretical antipodes", for the very reason that these "absurd, ill-founded deductions" were not considered to be in accord with the Holy Scriptures.”

— Otto Guericke (1672), New Magdeburg Experiments on the Vacuum of Space (pg. 4)

“Virgil, the bishop of Saltzburg, was condemned by the church, for having dared to maintain the existence of the antipodes. All the world is acquainted with the persecutions which Galileo suffered for pretending that the sun did not make its revolution round the earth. Descartes was put to death in a foreign land.”

— Baron d’Holbach (1770), The System of Nature (pg. 284)

“Virgilius was condemned to be burned for asserting the antipodes, or in other words, that the earth was a globe.”

— Thomas Paine (1794), The Age of Reason [2]