RELIGION OR DRESS, WHICH?
CHAS. G. FINNEY, long president of Oberlin College, in his advice to Christian women, says:— “Are you going to walk in the street? Take care how you dress. What is that on your head? What do that gaudy ribbon, and those ornaments upon your dress, say to every one that meets you? They make an impression that you wish to be thought pretty. Take care! You might just as well write on your clothes, ‘No truth in religion.’ They say, ‘Give me dress, give me fashion, give me flattery, and I am happy.’ The world understands this testimony as you walk in the streets. You are ‘living epistles, known and read of all men.’ If you show pride, levity, bad temper, and the like, it is like tearing open the wounds of the Saviour. How Christ might weep to see professors of religion going about hanging up his cause to contempt at the corners of the streets. Only ‘let the women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety, not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array, but (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works;’ only let them act consistently, and their conduct will tell on the world. . . . But oh, let them display vanity, try to be pretty, bow down to the goddess of fashion, fill their ears with ornaments, and their fingers with rings; let them put feathers in their hats and clasps on their arms, lace themselves up till they can hardly breathe; let them put on their ‘round tires, and walk, mincing as they go,’ and their influence is reversed.”