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 One
thousand, seven hundred, and sixty-eight years ago a preacher
took a look at the scandalous conduct of the women of his day,
and wrote an article. We have been doing this ever since — and
it doesn’t prove that the effort is useless, nor that women
are the only transgressors. (It suggests that there are more men
writers than women writers; and they watch women!)
It
may help us to take a better look at ourselves, however, to
consider the article by Tertullian, from Vol. IV, p. 18-f.,
Ante-Nicene Fathers.
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“There
must be no overstepping of that line to which simple and
sufficient refinements limit their desires — that line which
is pleasing to God. For they who rub their skins with
medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes
prominent with antimony, sin against HIM. To them, I suppose,
the plastic skill of God is displeasing.... Whatever is born
is the work of God. Whatever, then, is plastered on,
that is the devil’s work.”
“I
see some women turn the colour of their hair with saffron. They
are ashamed even of their own nation, ashamed that their
procreation did not assign them to Germany and to Gaul: thus, as
it is, they transfer their hair thither! I‘ll, say, most ill
do they augur for themselves with their flame-coloured head, and
think that graceful which in fact they are polluting! ...But,
however, God saith, “Which of you can make a white hair black,
or out of a black a white? And so they refute the Lord! “Behold!”
say they, “instead of white or
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black, we make it yellow,
— more winning in grace.” And yet such as repent of having
lived to old age to attempt to change it even from white to
black! 0 temerity! The age which is the object of our wishes and
prayers blushes for itself,! a theft is effected! youth, wherein
we have sinned, is sighed after! the opportunity of sobriety is
spoiled! Far from Wisdom’s daughters be folly so great!”
AND
THEN HE LOOKED AT MEN’
“Of
course now, I, a man, as being envious of women, am banishing
then quite from their own domains. Are there, in our case too,
some things which, in respect of the sobriety we are to maintain
on account of the fear due to God, are disallowed? If it is
true, as it is, that in men, for the sake of women (just as in
women for the sake of men), there is implanted, by a defect of
nature, the will to please; and if this sex of ours acknowledges
to itself deceptive trickeries of form peculiarly its own —
such as to cut the beard too sharply; to pluck it out here and
there: to shave round about the mouth; to arrange the hair, and
disguise its hoariness by dyes; to remove all the incipient down
all over the body; to fix each particular hair in its place with
some womanly pigment; to smooth all the rest of the body by the
aid of some rough powder or other; then, further, to take every
opportunity for consulting the mirror; to gaze anxiously into
it: — all these things are rejected as frivolous, as hostile
to modesty.” Tertullian, 202 A.D.
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