2. This very fact, that " the fashion of this world " is change- able and uncertain, makes it harder to give definite rules as to the way to avoid being '' fashioned according to this world." St. Paul does not attempt to do so ; he does not say, " Such and such
Ik, such and such employments, such and such pleasures are
230 IN FASHION OR IN FAVOUR
worldly: therefore the servants of Grod must avoid them"; but he gives us the warning against accommodating ourselves to the fashion, whatever it be, of this world. That warning holds good however the fashion may change,
^ Our English virtues and vices would seem at times to go in and out of fashion like our wearing apparel. Up to the time, say, of William Cobbett, contentment was accounted a virtue in an Englishman and enthusiasm a vice. To Hume or Gibbon the words "discontented enthusiast" would have suggested a re- pulsive and seditious personality of the Czolgosz type — or, at least, some contemptible Eanter or Shaker. It is curious to reflect how matters altered later on when the Divine duty of discontent came openly to be preached, and Besant and Rice's " Dick Mortiboy " impressed upon the school-feast children that unless your station in life was already among the great ones of the earth it was a despicable thing therewith to be content. ^
^ Another virtue, charity or philanthropy, seems to have fluctuated in favour. In The Moonstone, Mr. Murthwaite, suggesting Godfrey Ablewhite as the possible culprit, observes, " I am told that he is a great philanthropist — which is decidedly against him to begin with." Mr. Brough, the worthy family solicitor, cordially agreed with this, and it is pretty obvious that Wilkie Collins himself agreed with them both. The Moonstone was of course written long before charitable "slumming" came into fashion. Society philanthropists are always liable to offend by self-advertisement and the airs they give themselves of stand- ing in loco Dei to the poor.
But the good bishop with a meeker air Admits, and leaves them, Providence's care.
Pope's bishop was no doubt a worse man, but he avoided this particular rock of offence.^
3. "The last new fashion." There is something inherently contemptuous in the phrase. When we say of anything that it " has become a fashion," we almost mean it to be inferred that it has become so for no particularly good reason, and will probably some day cease to be so for some reason no better. Ever since the word came to be applied in our language to men's customs or whims, it has absorbed that other idea of change, and therefore
* Recreatwat and Reflections (from "The Saturday Review"), 373.
* lb., 377.
ROMANS XII. 2 231
of comparative worth! essness. Now there is nothing intrinsically worthless or wrong in mere change, or in the substitution of one " fashion " for another. In things into which the moral element does not enter, there is no harm in fashion, but obviously much good. Take the most obvious, because vulgarest, use of the term, as applied to dress. Into this "fashion," as into everything human, the evil will, the low morality of man can intrude. Ostentation, extravagance, self-indulgence, vulgar and reckless competition in all these things must, and do, intrude. But the love of beauty, of variety, in colour and form, is not base or worldly love. It should not shame us to find pleasure in letting the eye rest upon such things, which like all God's gifts are seen and loved first as we gaze upon the faultless beauties and the everchanging beauties of His creation. That the eye, given us to perceive and rejoice in these beauties, should long for an ever- changing succession of them, should discern the loveliness of alternation and variety, is no disgrace. Change, transition, con- trast, whether in Nature or in Art — how large a part do not these make in the beauty of God's creation, and of that human art which has grown out of the study of that creation ! Should we not be grateful for the " shifting fashions " — for so they are — of God's world, for the shifting fashions of the landscape in winter and in summer, in spring and in autumn?
^ Robertson had seen a great deal of the fashionable society of watering-places. With the exception of the brief interludes of Oxford and Winchester, he had lived all his days in such places. By the world generally he would himself be regarded as a man of fashion. He himself keenly appreciated the social and intellectual side of such society. But he had a thorough suspicion and dislike of the essential characteristics of these places. This comes out in his sermons and also in his letters: "If you wish to know what hoUowness and heartlessness are, you must seek for them in the world of light, elegant, superficial fashion, where frivolity has turned the heart into a rock-bed of selfishness. Say what men will of the heartlessness of trade, it is nothing compared with the heartlessness of fashion. Say what they will of the atheism of science, it is nothing to the atheism of that round of pleasure in which many a heart lives — dead while it lives." ^
4. There are fashions in morals as well as in art, in religion,