Note 1404 — Chapter XVI · —Influences Of A Mountain Environment

"To have and to hold" is the motto of the mountains. Like remote islands, they are often museums of social antiquities. Antiquated races and languages abound. The mountaineers of the Southern Appalachians speak to-day an eighteenth century English. Their literature is the ballad poetry of old England and Scotland, handed down from parent to child. Clan feuds settle questions of justice, as in the Caucasus and the Apennines. Religion is orthodox to the last degree, sectarianism is rigid, and Joshua's power over the sun remains in some lonely valleys undiscounted.1404 These are all the marks of isolation and retardation which appear in similar environments elsewhere. Especially religious dogmas tend to show in mountains a tenacity of life impossible in the plains. The Kafirs, inhabiting the high Hindu Kush Mountains of Badakshan, and apparently of Pelasgic, early Greek, or Persian origin, have a religion blended of paganism, Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism.1405 One intruding faith has been unable to dislodge the previous incumbent, so the three have combined. The great historical destiny of the small, barren, isolated Judean plateau was to hold aloof the chaste religion of the desert-bred Jews from the sensuous agricultural gods of the Canaanites; to conserve and fix it; if need be, to narrow it to a provincial tribal faith, to stamp it with exclusiveness, conservatism, and formalism, as its adherents with bigotry,1406 for this is always the effect of geographical seclusion. But when all these limitations of Judaism are acknowledged, the fact remains that that segregated mountain environment performed the inestimable service for the world of keeping pure and undefiled the first and last great gift of the desert, a monotheistic faith.