DRESSINESS IN CHURCH

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 26, 1869

DRESSINESS IN CHURCH.

Harper's Bazar has some reputation in the fashionable world, and is certainly free from the charge of prudery. Many may give heed to criticisms of dress in such a journal who would not listen to suggestions of those speaking from a professedly religious standpoint. Yet this fashionable authority thus denounces the display of dress that is so common in our houses of worship:

“The best bred people of every Christian country, but our own, avoid all personal display when engaged in worship and prayer. Our churches, on the contrary, are made places for the exhibition of fine apparel and other costly and flaunting compliances with fashion, by those who boast of superior wealth and manners. We shall leave our gewgawed devotees to reconcile humiliation in worship with vanity in dress. How far fine clothes may effect the personal piety of the devotee we do not pretend even to conjecture; but we have a very decided opinion in regard to their influence upon the religion of others. The fact is, that our churches are so fluttering with birds of fine feathers that no sorry fowl will venture in. It is impossible for poverty, in rags and patches, or even in decent but humble costume, to take its seat, if it should be so fortunate as to find a place, by the side of wealth in brocade and broadcloth. The church being the only place on this side of the grave designed for the rich and the poor to meet together in equal humility before God, it certainly should always be kept free to all. It is so in most of the churches in Europe, where the beggar in rags and wretchedness, and the wealthiest and most eminent, whose appropriate soberness of dress leaves them without mark of external distinction, kneel down together, equalized by a common humiliation before the only Supreme Being. The adoption of a more simple attire for church on the part of the rich in this country would have the effect—certainly not of diminishing their own personal piety, but probably of increasing the disposition for religious observance on the part of the poor.”