Dress by John Wesley

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 15, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 39.

Dress.

By John Wesley

THE wearing of costly array is directly opposite to the being adorned with good works. Nothing can be more evident than this; for the more you lay out on your own apparel, the less you have left to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to lodge the strangers, to relieve those that are sick and in prison, to lessen the numberless afflictions to which we are exposed in this vale of tears. And here is no room for evasion, "I may be as humble in cloth of gold as in sackcloth." If you could be as humble when you chose costly as when you chose plain apparel (which I flatly deny); yet you could not be as beneficent, as plenteous in good works. Every shilling which you save from your own apparel, you may expend in clothing the naked, and relieving the various necessities of the poor, whom "ye have always with you." Therefore, every shilling which you needlessly spend on your own apparel is, in effect, stolen from God and the poor!

And of how many precious opportunities of doing good have you defrauded yourself! How often have you disabled yourself from doing good, by purchasing what you did not want! For what end did you buy these ornaments? To please God? No; but to please your own fancy, or to gain the admiration and applause of those that were no wiser than yourself. How much good might you have done with that money? And what an irreparable loss you have sustained by not doing it, if it be true that the day is at hand, when "every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labor."—Wesley.