ABSTRACT
Take, for example, the place we accord to fashion in dress. It is an absolute tyranny in our Western civilization. It causes universal waste of money and universal waste of energy and of time. At the bottom of this waste is a worse evil—the constant deferring in our minds to what might best be described as a false god; a despot who causes one to judge matters not according to their inherent good or evil, but according as they come under his quite arbitrary ban or blessing. We all bow down to this false god, and constantly allow his fictitious standard of good and evil to obliterate the realities for us. What ‘lady’ would venture to walk down Regent Street 25in an overall, or what ‘gentleman’ would go about London in his shirt-sleeves, no matter how great the heat of the day? Think of the heart-searchings it would cause any of us to accept an invitation to dinner on the part of any ‘society’ person, if we did not possess an evening dress! (I recently heard of a ‘high-class’ but impecunious visitor from Russia who was put to great inconvenience, and a good deal of mental distress, by our absurd standards in this respect.) It seems to us lacking in ‘respect’ to those who entertain us to appear in their homes dressed below a certain standard of expense and of fashion; lacking in respect to the public in general, or, stranger still, lacking in self-respect, to appear in public meanly clothed; strangest of all, lacking in respect for the Almighty to attend Divine Worship in shabby clothes. In our churches, those who are perforce shabbily dressed feel it proper to keep in the background if they come at all. There are hundreds of similar facts—too obvious and familiar in the ordinary course to arrest attention. But since I have travelled in Russia they have acquired a new interest for me. I ask myself: Why do we take such facts as a matter of course? What does it signify? Why do we take trivialities so seriously? How is it that it would take a real effort of will on my part to be seen washing my own doorstep?
