The True Standard of Dress.
By Mrs. Stowe
WE are always excessive when we sacrifice the higher beauty to obtain the lower one. A woman who will sacrifice domestic affection, conscience, self-respect and honor, to love of dress, we all agree loves dress too much. She loses the true and higher beauty of womanhood for the lower beauty of gems, and flowers, and colors. A girl who sacrifices to dress all her time, all her strength, all her money, to the neglect of the cultivation of her mind and heart, and to the neglect of the claims of others on her helpfulness, is sacrificing the higher to the lower beauty; her fault is not the love of beauty, but in loving the wrong and inferior kind. In fine, girls, you may try yourself by this standard. You love to dress too much, when you care more for your outward adornings than for your inward dispositions; when it afflicts you more to have torn your dress than to have lost your temper—when you are much more troubled by an ill-fitting gown than by a neglected duty—when you are less concerned at having made an unjust comment, or spread a scandalous report, than at having worn a passee bonnet; when you are less troubled at the thought of being found at the last great feast without the wedding garment, than at being found at the party to-night in the fashion of last year. No Christian woman, as I view it, ought to give such attention to her dress as to allow it to take up all of three important things; viz., all her time, all her strength, all her money. Whoever does this, lives not the Christian, but the Pagan life—worships not at the Christian's altar of our Lord Jesus, but at the shrine of the lower Venus of Corinth and Rome.—Mrs. Stowe.