u 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.

Buddhism, once the official religion of Korea but disestablished three
centuries ago, has taken refuge in the Diamond Mountains, far from the
main roads; there a dull, moribund form of the faith dozes on in the
monasteries and monastic shrines of these secluded highlands.[1407]
Driven out of India, Buddhism survives only in the Himalayan border of
the country among the local Tibeto-Burman peoples, and in Ceylon, whose
mountain city of Kandy is its stronghold. The persecuted Waldenses, a
heretic sect who fled in 1178 from the cities of France to the Alps,
took refuge in the remote valleys of the Pellice, Chisone, and Augrogne
some thirty miles southwest of Turin. There, protected equally against
attack and modification, the Waldenses have maintained the old tenets
and organization of their religion.[1408]

[Sidenote: Conservatism of mountain peoples.]

The mountain-dweller is essentially conservative. There is little in his
environment to stimulate him to change, and little reaches him from the
outside world. The "spirit of the times" is generally the spirit of a
past time, when it has penetrated to his remote upland. He is strangely
indifferent to what goes on in the great outstretched plains below him.
What filters in to him from the outside has little suggestion for him,
because it does not accord with the established order which he has
always known. Hence innovation is distasteful to him. This repugnance to
change reaches its clearest expression, perhaps, in the development and
preservation of national costumes. _Tracht,_ which is crystallized style
in dress, appears nowhere so widespread and so abundantly differentiated
as in mountain districts. In Switzerland, every canton has its
distinctive costume which has come down from a remote past. The peasants
of Norway, of the German and Austrian Alps, of the Basq