Extravagantly Dressed Children.
ONE of the crying sins of the age is the excessive dressing of children. In many a professedly Christian home the first lesson a child learns is to dress in the prevailing style. It leaves the cradle admiring its fine clothes, and passes through hours of trial and torture with curling papers and crimping pins before it has learned to say, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Multitudes of these gaily dressed children of the church appear on our streets, and in our Sabbath-schools, bedecked and beplumed like the veriest butterflies. No wonder that, in the midst of such a display of fluting, and flouncing, and frizzling, and sashing, that dress, in many of our Sabbath-schools, should be the one controlling thought of life. When children's hearts swell out with pride and vanity, there is little room for lessons of Jesus and Heaven. And mothers would do well to remember that in thus extravagantly dressing their children, they are not only fostering feelings of pride and vanity that may ruin their children, but they are shutting the Sabbath-school doors against the children of the poor. They cannot come into the presence of these gaily dressed children of fashion, and bear the scrutiny of their laughing, prying eyes, and they stay away. And in many cases, the only door heavenward, the only window that would let in the light of truth, is darkened, and they are left to drift on in the slums of vice in which they find themselves, to drift down to ruin and death. Vain mother! What answer will you make when the Judge of all the earth, in whose sight these poor, neglected ones, are as precious as the children of a king, requires their blood at your hands? We beg you, as you value your own soul and the souls of the children committed to you, keep your frills and farbelows out of the Sunday-school and out of our public schools. You can do more to damage the Sunday-school cause than all the workers and conventions can remedy. You can do more to overthrow our public school system, which is the chief corner-stone of the Republic, than the combined powers of the papacy. Dr. J. W. Alexander, writing of the children of the church, says: “As I grow older as a parent, my views are changing fast as to the degree of conformity to the world which we should allow in our children. I am horror-struck to count up the profligate children of pious parents, and even of ministers. The door at which those influences enter which countervail parental instruction and example, I am persuaded, is yielding to the ways of good society. By dress, books, and amusements, an atmosphere is formed which is not that of Christianity. More than ever do I feel that our families must stand in a kind and determined opposition to the fashions of the world, breasting the waves like the Eddystone Lighthouse. And I have found nothing yet which requires more courage and independence than to rise, even a little, but decidedly above the part of the religious world around us.”