Various religious bodies, at the outset,
adopted severe rules in protest against it. The Quakers and the
Methodists prescribed certain fixed modes of costume as a barrier
against its frivolities and follies. In the Romish Church an entrance
on any religious order prescribed entire and total renunciation of all
thought and care for the beautiful in person or apparel, as the first
step towards saintship. The costume of the _religieuse_ seemed to be
purposely intended to imitate the shroudings and swathings of a corpse
and the lugubrious color of a pall, so as forever to remind the
wearer that she was dead to the world of ornament and physical beauty.
All great Christian preachers and reformers have leveled their
artillery against the toilet, from the time of St. Jerome downward;
and Tom Moore has put into beautiful and graceful verse St. Jerome's
admonitions to the fair churchgoers of his time.

WHO IS THE MAID?

ST. JEROME'S LOVE.

Who is the maid my spirit seeks,
Through cold reproof and slander's blight?
Has _she_ Love's roses on her cheeks?
Is _hers_ an eye of this world's light?
No: wan and sunk with midnight prayer
Are the pale looks of her I love;
Or if, at times, a light be there,
Its beam is kindled from above.

I chose not her, my heart's elect,
From those who seek their Maker's shrine
In gems and garlands proudly decked,
As if themselves were things divine.
No: Heaven but faintly warms the breast
That beats beneath a broidered veil;
And she who comes in glittering vest
To mourn her frailty, still is frail.

Not so the faded form I prize
And love, because its bloom is gone;
The glory in those sainted eyes
Is all the grace _her_ brow puts on.
And ne'er was Beauty's dawn so bright,
So touching, as that form's decay,
Which, like the altar's trembling light,
In holy lustre wastes away.

"But the defect of all these modes of warfare on the elegances and
refinements of the toilet was that they were too indiscriminate. They
were in reality founded on a false principle. They took for granted
that there was something radically corrupt and wicked in the body and
in the physical system. According to this mode of viewing things, the
body was a loathsome and pestilent prison, in which the soul was
locked up and enslaved, and the eyes, the ears, the taste, the smell,
were all so many corrupt traitors in conspiracy to pois