* F. Arnold, Robertson of Brighton, 224.
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even, as well as in social -etiquette; and it is against these that St. Paul warns his Eoman Christians. Whenever and wherever the shifting moral sense of Society forms its own rules and stan- dards, without reference to the revelation of God in His Word, and in His Son Jesus Christ, these fashions take their rise — the creations of the world — with no assurance of permanence, because they depend ultimately upon the conscience of the hour, which must needs vary. This must be true of every age — of this age no less than of that of which the Apostle was writing. It is to the conscience of the hour that we are not to " conform," or " be fashioned," if only because it has no permanence. There is no security, even if it is decently moral to-day, that it will be the same to-morrow.
^ The relations of the Kingdom of heaven and the world have grown infinitely more complex since St. Paul's day. When he wrote, the boundary line between the Church and the "World was tolerably clear and defined. It is no longer so, and the World presents new fronts to the Church, or rather is so permeated by the ways, if not the spirit, of the Church, that its fashions have become both more complex and more alluring. Now the World has become leavened to a certain extent by the ethics of the Church, and the Church leavened, alas ! by the lower morals of the World, so that the boundary lines between the two become fainter and more misleading. And the pressure of the World upon the Church is greater than it was in St. Paul's day, because it touches it at a greater number of points. The fashion of the World seriously threatened the real Christians in Eome ; but it now threatens in a thousand fresh ways the nominal Christians of to-day.
^ " Fashion," as a term, has degraded since St. Paul's day. Unreality, as well as instability, is inseparable from the name of " fashion." " Why does such and such a man or woman do so and so ? " " Oh, because it's the fashion — because it's the thing to do!" Fashion is the public opinion of the "set," to which everything else is sacrificed. The tyranny of the "set" — how inflexible its grip ! what evils has it not to answer for ! The vox fopuli, even when it is that of the large, free, public conscience, has no security for being the vox Dei ; but how when it is the voice of a sect or a clique ? To be really cynical is a bad enough thing — an affront to God and an insult to the law of Christian love; but what shall we say of the cynical fashion, taken up because for the moment, and with certain people we admire, it is
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the sign of cleverness and distinction. Then there is the sceptical fashion. To refuse God's revelation, in Nature and in Conscience and in His Word, is sad enough ; it is matter for deep pity as well as reproach. But what shall we say when it too has no root at all, good or evil, but is taken up as a badge of enlightenment, as a mark of separation from the humdrum superstitions of the world, and to win the good opinion of those in whom the same scepticism is perhaps at least genuine ?
Terrible, again, is the growing defiance of the accepted morali- ties and decorums — the custom-hallowed decencies and reticences of life — which we see everywhere about us. Everywhere do we see signs of this revolt against old ideas of reverence, of modesty, of charity, and of courtesy, under the pretence of protesting against whatever is unreal or hypocritical in the so-called " re- spectabilities " of life. Where this is a genuine revolt, having a supposed excuse in undoubted conventionalities and hypocrisies to be found among us, it is at least not ignoble ; but for one person who is fired by a genuine indignation that overmasters him, how many are there who follow in the same track only to win credit for the same thing, or even, must we not say, because the laxer morality, the reduced stringency, is easier and pleasanter ?
These and a thousand other fashions and follies are all around us. The satirists of the day know these things well. The world is keenly alive to its own weak points. But satire has no power to cure them, has no "healing in its wings." For satire treats symptoms only, and no wise physician is content with this. It was one of Pope's half-truths that
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien. As, to be hated, needs but to be seen.
But " hated " is just the wrong word here. To see the hateful- ness of a thing and to hate it are quite different stages of moral growth. To hate is the correlative of to love ; and when we have once begun to hate the evil that is in the world, we have also begun to hate the evil that is in ourselves, and our deliverance is at hand.^