VII.

FASHION.

GOD is a lover of dress. He has put robes of beauty and glory upon all his works. Who can doubt that he will smile upon the evidence of correct taste manifested by his children? No man can afford to disregard appearances. The shabby man loses every year a thousand times the cost of a good suit of clothes. Employers like their people to dress well. It is easier to borrow a hundred dollars in a good suit of clothes than ten cents in an old coat and shabby hat. "The apparel oft proclaims the man." Dress is the visible sign by which the stranger forms his opinion of us. Dress affects a man's manners and morals. A general negligence of dress very often proclaims a corresponding negligence of address. We can scarcely lose self-respect so long as we have respect to appearance; still, the best clothes are often worn by many small-salaried dapper dandies, broken-down merchants, and men

who avoid their tailor because of mortgages on their clothes. Polonius's advice is good:

"Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy."

No true woman will be indifferent to her appearance; elegance fits woman. The love of beauty in dress belongs to her; she ought to take pride in herself and be solicitous to have all her belongings well chosen and in good taste. A sloven is abominable. Rudeness is sin. Female loveliness appears to the best advantage when set off by simplicity of dress. A woman is best dressed who conducts herself so that those who have been in her company shall not recollect what she had on.

I have no sympathy with the "dress-reformers," who glory in their outlandish apparel, and who are more proud of being "out of the fashion" than others of being in.

To love dress is not to be a slave of fashion; to give dress your first thought, your best time, or all your money, is the evidence of such slavery. The Bible says, "The body is more than raiment"; but many people read the Bible Hebrew-wise-backward-and thus the general conviction is that raiment is more than the body.

Fashion tyrannically rules the world. She

pinches the feet with tight shoes, and squeezes the breath out of the body with tight lacing. To be "in the fashion" has made the most famous frauds of the day, and keeps hundreds of men struggling for their commercial existence.

Fashion dwarfs the intellect. Virtue gives up the ghost at her smile. Fashion is the greatest of all liars; she has made society insincere; she has turned society into a great show-room; she has made the poor poorer, and the rich more avaricious. Fashion is New York's leading undertaker, and drives hundreds of hearses to Greenwood.

Dress is a lower beauty, for which the higher beauty should not be sacrificed. The holiest duty is to wear the richest dress on the soul. Woman, with her strong and quick powers, her bold and daring genius, was made for a higher purpose, a nobler use, a grander destiny, than to waste herself on the finified fooleries of fashion. Care more for what you are than what you appear. Let an empty brain, hollow heart, and useless life throw you into a hysterical fit quicker than an old-fashioned bonnet or an ill-fitting dress. Let not fashion close your ears to the appeal of Christ's church, and your eyes to the outstretched hand of the poor. Let not fashion demand of you a style of dress insufficient to keep out the cold and rain, and

that will imperil your health.

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What! know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?" Submit to no style which will compromise your modesty. Wear no costume which suggests impure thoughts to the beholder.

It is the instinctive propensity in human nature to decorate. It is right to adorn yourself for your own eyes, for the eyes of your husband, if you are a true wife; if you are a maiden, for the eyes of suitors and companions; but first of all strive to adorn yourself for God's eyes. "Whose adorning let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price." It is worthy of remark that Plato, the loftiest of all Grecian sages, has a passage which strikingly resembles that of the Apostle: "Behavior, and not gold, is the ornament of a woman. To courtesans these things -ornaments and jewels-are advantageous to their catching more admirers; but for a woman who wishes to enjoy the favor of one man good behavior is her proper ornament and not dresses; and you should have the blush upon your countenance, which is the sign of modesty, instead of paint, and worth and sobriety

instead of gold and emeralds." Paul to Titus says: "That they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things." Even the great truth of Jesus Christ is here represented as being susceptible of decoration on the part of those who profess it. Adorn the Gospel by useful lives. Say not that the doors of useful service are closed against you. On every hand there are hungry to feed and naked to clothe, and many sick in the hospitals longing for the sound of woman's voice and the touch of woman's hand. Seventy-five thousand destitute children to be gathered from our streets into the Sunday-schools, and three hundred and forty-five thousand adult heathen in our own city to be led to the Saviour. How much better to fill such a sphere to which God calls you than to flutter like silly butterflies round milliners, dressmakers, and manicures. Live for Christ; and with the light and glory of a true womanhood, fill every day with usefulness, as a June day fills the air with the redolence of the roses. The busy Master might have enthroned himself in a majestic repose, but his unwearied going about doing good was a withering rebuke to uselessness. He honored the useful in the fowls of the air and in the lilies of the field, but the barren tree he smote with a curse. He closed the bright