Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1894 — FASHION’S FOLLIES. [ARTICLE]

FASHION’S FOLLIES.

Inordinate Fashion a Foe to All Christian Impulse. Business and Character Wrecked on the Wardrobe—Dr. Talmage’s Sermon. The Rev. Dr. Talmage, who is now in Melbourne on his round the world tour, chose as the subject for his sermon last Sunday through the press “The Tragedy of Dress,” the text selected being I Peter iii, 3,4, “Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair and the wearing of gold or the putting on of apparel, but let.it be the hidden man of the heart.” That we should all be clad is proved by the opening of the first wardrobe in paradise with its apparel of dark green. That we should all, as far as our means allow us, be beautifully and gracefully appareled is proved.by the fact that God never made a wave but he gilded it with golden sunbeams, or a tree but he garlanded it with blossoms, or a sky but he studded it with stars, or allowed even the smoke of a furnace to ascend but he columned and turreted and domed and scrolled it into outlines of indescribable gracefulness. One summer morning I saw an army of a million spears, each one idorned with a diamond of the first water —I mean the grass with the dew on it. When the prodigal came home, his father not only put a coat ?n his back, but jewelry on his hand. Christ wore a beard. Paul, the bachelor apostle, not afflicted with any sentimentality, admired the arrangement of a woman’s hair when he.sai4.ih hi? ppistle, “if a woman have long hair, it is a glory unto her.” There will be a fashion in heaven as on earth, but it will be a different kind Of-fashion. <L

JVJen p,t& as much the idolaters of fashion a* '#omen, but they sacriicy ojyja different part of the altar. With men the fashion goes Co cigars ind club parties and wine suppqfs. ! In’ the United States the'men ■ chew-up and smoke $100,000,000 worth of tobacco jvery year. That is their fashion. The first baleful influence I notice is in fraud, illimitable and ghastly. Do you know that Arnold of the revolvtion proposed to sqll his country in order to get the money t<? support his wife’s wardrobe? I declare sere before God and thi’s people'that the effort to keep up expensive establishments in this country is sending more business men to temporal perdition than all other causes com Dined. What w’as it that sent Gib man to the penitentiary, and Philaielphia Morton to the warering of stocks, and the life insurance presidents to perjured statements about their assets, and has completely upset our American finances? What was it that overthrew the United States secretary at Washington, the mash of whose fall shook the conti - nent? But why should Igo to these famous defaultings to show what nen will do in order to keep up great aome style and expensive wardrobe, when you and I know scores of men who are put to their wit’s end and ire lashed from January to December in the attempt? Our politicians may theorize until the expiration of their terms of office is to the best way of improving our monetary condition in this country. It will be of no use and things will be no better until we leaAi to put on jur heads and backs and feet and bands no more than we can pay for. There are clerks in stores and banks on limited salaries who, in the vain attempt to keep the wardrobe of their family as showy as other folks’ wardrobes, are dying of muffs and diamonds and shawls and high hats, and they have nothing left except what they give to cigars and wine suppers, "and they die before their time, and they will expect us ministers to preach about them as though they were the victims of early piety, and after a high-class funeral, with silver handles at the side of the coffin of extraordinary brightness, it will be found out that the undertaker is cheated out of his legitimate expenses! Do not send to me to preach the funeral sermon of a man who dies like that. I will blurt out the whole truth and tell that he was strangled to death by his wife's ribbons.

Will you forgive me if I say in tersest shape possible that some of the men have to forge and to perjure md to swindle to pay for their wives' dresses? I will say it whether you forgive me or not. Again, inordinate fashion is the foe of all Christian almsgiving. Men and women put so much in personal display that they often have nothing for God and the cause of suffering humanity. A Christian nan cracking his Palais Royal glove icross the back by shutting up his iand to hide the cent he puts into the poor-box. A Christian woman it the story of the Hottentots, cryng copious tears into a twenty-five iollar handkerchief and then giving » two-cent piece to the collection, ■ hrusting it under the bills so people will not know but it was a teh■•ollar goldpiece. One hundred dolars for incense to fashion; 2 cents or God. God gives us 90 cents out >f every dollar. The other 10 cents by command of His Bible belong to iim. Is not God liberal according •n His tithing system laid down in he old testament? Is not God lib•r.il in giving us 90 cents out of a ollar when He takes but 10? We !o not like that. We want to have 9 cents for ourselves and one for J nd.

Now, I would a creat de? 1 -athar

steal M cents from you than from God. I think one reason why a great' many people do not get along in wordly accumulation faster is because they do not observe this divine rule. God says, ‘'Well, if that man is rofrualisfied with 90 cents of a dollar, then I will take the whole dollar and I will give it to the man or woman who is honest with me.” The greatest obstacle to charity in the Christian church today is the fact that men expend so much money on their table, and women so much on their dress, they have got nothing left for the work of God and the worldls betterment.

Again, inordinate fashion is distraction to public worship. You know very well there area good many people who come to church just &s they go to the races to see who will come out first. What a flutter it makes in church when some woman with extraordinary display of fashion comes in! “What a love of a bonnet!” says some one. “What fright!” say five hundred. For the most merciless critics in the world are fashion critics. Men and women with souls to be saved passing the hour in wondering where that man got his cravat or what store that woman/patron-' izes. In many of our churches the preliminary exercises are taken up with the discussion of wardrobes. It is pitiable. Is it not wonderful that the Lord does not strike the meeting houses with lightning? What distraction of public worship! Dying men and women, whose bodies are soon to be turned into dust, yet before three worlds strutting like peacocks, the awful question of the soul’s destiny submerged by the question of navy blue velvet and long fan train skirt, long enough to drag up the church aisle, the husband’s store, office, shop, factory, fortune and the admiration of half the people in the building. Men and women come to church late to show their clothes. Insatiate fashion also belittles the intellect. Oqx minds are enlarged or they dwindlb jpst in proportion to the importance Of the subject on which we constantly dwell. Can you Imagine; anything more dwarfing to the human’, intellect than the Study of men on the Street who, judgigg from their elaboration, I think gjust have taken two hours to arrange iheir apparel. After a of that kind of absorption, which one of McAllister’s magnifying glasses will be powerful enough to make the man’s character visible? They alt land in idiocy. I have seen men at the summering watering places through fashion the mbre wreck of what they once were. Sallow of cheek. Meager of limb. Hollow at the chest. Showing no animation save in rushing across a room to pick up a lady’s fan. Simpering along the corridors, the same compliments they simpered twenty years ago. A New York lawyer at the United States hotel, Saratoga, within our hearing, rushed across a room to say to a sensible woman, “You are as sweet as peaches!” The fools of fashion are my riad. Fashion not only destroys the body, but it makes idiotic the intellect.

-Yet, my friends, I have given you only tire milder phase of this evilIt shuts a great multitude out of heaven. The first peal of thunder that shook Sinai declared, “Thou shalt have no other God before me,” and you will have to choose between the goddess of fashion and the Christian God. There are a great many seats in heaven, and they are all ea«y seats, but not one seat for the devotee of fashion. Heaven is for meek and quiet spirits. Heaven is for those who think more of their souls than of their bodies. Heaven is for those who have more joy in Christian charity than in dry goods religion. Why. if you with your idolatry of fashion should somehow get into heaven, you would be for putting a French roof on the “house of many mansions.” Give up this idolatry of fashion or give up heaven.

What would you do standing beside the Countess of Huntington, whose joy it was to build chapels for the poor, or with that Christian woman of Boston who fed 1.500 children of the street at Faneuil Hall on New Year’s Day, giving out as a sort of doxology at the end of the meeting a pair of shoes to each one of them," or those Dorcases of modern society who have consecrated their needles to the Lord, and who will get eternal reward for every stitch they take. Oh, men and women, give up the idolatry of fashion. The rivalry and competitions of such a life are a stupendous wretchedness. You will always find somp ode with brighter array, and with more palatial residence, and with lavender kid gloves that make a tighter fit. And if you buy this thing and wear it you will wish you had bought something else and worn it. And the frets of such a life will bring the crows feet to your temples before they are due, and when you come to die you will have a miserable time. I have seen men and women of fashion die. and I never saw one of them die well. The trappings off, there they lay on the tumbled pillow, and there were just (two things that bothered them—a wasted life and a coming eternity. The most ghastly deathbeds on earth are the one where a man dies of delirium tremens, and the other where a woman dies after having sacrificed all her faculties of body, mind and soul in the worship of fashion, My friends, we must appear in judgment to answer for what we have woni on our bodies as well as for what repentances we have exercised with our souls. On that day I see coming Beau Brutamel of the last centurr. without his doak. like

which all England got a cloak, and without his cane, like which all England got a cane; without his snuffbox,like whjch all England gotasnuffbox. He, the fop of the ages, particular about everything but his morletters that down to’ old age he showed in pride to prove his early wicked gallantries, and Absalom without his hair, and Marchioness Pompadour without her titles, and, Mrs. Arnold, the belle of Wall-st, when that was the center of fashion without her fripperies of vesture. .And in great haggardness they shall go away into eternal expatriation, while among the queens of heavenly society will be found Vashti, who wore the modest veil before the palatial bacchanalians, and Hannah, who annually made a little coat for Samuel at the temple, and grandmother Lois, the ancestress of Timothy, who imitated her virtue, and Mary, who gave Jesus Christ to the world, and many of you, the wives and mothers and sisters and daughters of the present Christian church, who, through great tribulation, are entering into the kingdom of God. Christ announced who would make up the royal family of heaven when he said, “Whosoever doeth the will of God, the same is my brother, my sister, my mother.”