Admirable.

Comfort, taste, and religion agree that _Dress_ is one of the
proprieties of civilized and Christian life. If religion reaches a part,
it does the whole of life. If it should direct us anywhere, it should in
the matter of Dress. There are few things upon which people are more
liable to err, and about which there is more wrong feeling than this.
Many religious sects have seen this, and have attempted to bring the
matter of Dress wholly under the ban of ecclesiastical direction. In
this they were partly right and partly in error. They were right in
believing that religion should extend a fostering and restraining care
over the subject of Dress; but wrong in believing that it should Dress
all in the same manner. Our Quaker brethren, the Friends, than whom no
purer and better people have ever lived--noble followers of the lowly
Prince of Peace--the truest _friends_ that humanity has ever found
since the days of the Apostles, or that Jesus has ever had in the
earth--the world-renowned speakers of the sweet, plain language which
hath the charm of divinity within it, and in which love always chooses
to express its tender emotions--adopted the idea that religion should
extend its sway over the subject of Dress. In this they did well; but,
in my humble opinion, erred in putting the shears into the hands of
sectarianism to cut every man's Dress by exactly the same pattern, and
to choose it all from the same grand web of drab. It is sectarianism,
and not religion, which would Dress every man alike. That is making
Dress the badge of the order. Any thing put on outwardly to tell the
world to what sect you belong is an evidence of sectarianism, and not of
religion. The Quaker wears the sign of his sect all over his body. The
drunkard wears his on his face. The Catholic wears his in his beads and
cross. If God had designed that all men should dress in one color,
methinks he would have made them all of one complexion; and not only so,
but would have colored nature in that peculiar hue--would have clothed
all the forests, fields, flowers, birds, and skies in that color, and
have fitted every man's taste to enjoy it.

If He had designed every man to cut his Dress in one form, after one
model, I see not why he did not fashion nature after that pattern, and
make that peculiar curve, and cast the grand leading ones in all his
works, and fit the universal taste to that form. But, on the contrary,
nature is robed in every va