valley
into an abyss of factory-stench and toil, or the carrying of a line of
traffic through some green place of shepherd solitude.

Sec. 43. For, if there be any truth in the impression which I have always
felt, and just now endeavored to enforce, that the mountains of the
earth are its natural cathedrals, or natural altars, overlaid with gold,
and bright with broidered work of flowers, and with their clouds resting
on them as the smoke of a continual sacrifice, it may surely be a
question with some of us, whether the tables of the moneychanger,
however fit and commendable they may be as furniture in other places,
are precisely the thing which it is the whole duty of man to get well
set up in the mountain temple.

Sec. 44. And perhaps it may help to the better determination of this
question, if we endeavor, for a few patient moments, to bear with that
weakness of our forefathers in feeling an awe for the hills; and,
divesting ourselves, as far as may be, of our modern experimental or
exploring activity, and habit of regarding mountains chiefly as places
for gymnastic exercise, try to understand the temper, not indeed
altogether exemplary, but yet having certain truths and dignities in
it, to which we owe the founding of the Benedictine and Carthusian
cloisters in the thin Alpine air. And this monkish temper we may, I
suppose, best understand by considering the aspect under which mountains
are represented in the Monk's book. I found that in my late lectures, at
Edinburgh, I gave great offence by supposing, or implying, that
scriptural expressions could have any force as bearing upon modern
practical questions; so that I do not now, nor shall I any more, allude
to such expressions as in any wise necessarily bearing on the worldly
business of the practical Protestant, but only as necessary to be
glanced at in order to understand the temper of those old monks, who had
the awkward habit of understanding the Bible literally; and to get any
little good which momentary sympathy with the hearts of a large and
earnest class of men may surely bring to us.

Sec. 45. The monkish view of mountains, then, already alluded to,[118] was
derived wholly from that Latin Vulgate of theirs; and, speaking as a
monk, it may perhaps be permitted me to mark the significance of the
earliest mention of mountains in the Mosaic books; at least, of those in
which some Divine appointment or command is stated respecting them. They
are first brought