Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/267

 greatest of monarchs, but Alexander dead would be a thing of nought.

That strangest of mediæval preachers, Meffreth, who got into trouble by denying the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, in his second sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent, discusses the locality of the terrestrial Paradise, and claims S. Basil and S. Ambrose as his authorities for stating that it is situated on the top of a very lofty mountain in Eastern Asia; so lofty indeed is the mountain, that the waters of the four rivers fall in cascade down to a lake at its foot, with such a roar that the natives who live on the shores of the lake are stone-deaf. Meffreth also explains the escape of Paradise from submergence at the Deluge, on the same grounds as does the Master of Sentences (lib. 2, dist. 17, c. 5), by the mountain being so very high that the waters which rose over Ararat were only able to wash its base.

A manuscript in the British Museum tells us that “Paradise is neither in heaven nor on earth. The book says that Noah’s flood was forty fathoms high, over the highest hills that are on earth; and Paradise is forty fathoms higher than Noah’s flood was, and it hangeth between heaven and earth wonderfully, as the ruler of all things made it.