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Moses arose and addressed God thus: "Thou knowest well that the voices are not of lambs and sheep, but of the young of Israel, who for three days have been fasting and languishing in fetters, only to be slaughtered on the morrow to the delight of the arch-enemy." Then God felt compassion with Israel, for the sake of his innocent little ones.
Living for himself alone, without cognizance of his membership in one great universal system, he had needed the sense of churchmanship to make him act up to his duties as father, neighbour, citizen, and man of property; and when aroused, he found that the time of his inaction had bound him about with fetters.
A. "All that can and must be said against them is that they have been too long retained around the arms and limbs of grown-up manhood to check the spiritual progress of religion; that by Jewish ritualism and Christian dogmatism they became fetters unto the soul, turning the light of heaven into a misty haze to blind the eye, and even into a Hell fire of fanaticism to consume souls."
How sweet it was to know that earth's winding-sheet had been rent from her breast once more; that the shackles had been torn from her streams and the fetters loosed from her trees; to feel that where there had been barren desolation and lifeless refuse of last year's math would soon appear green shoots of grass, and growing flowers; that the tender leaves of the trees would whisper each to each in a language which we cannot understand, but which we love to hear.
The primary object of Dress is to clothe and make comfortable the body, so that it may be the peaceful and happy dwelling-place of the spirit in its earthly pilgrimage. But filling it with disease is not making it comfortable. Hampering it in fetters is not making it comfortable. I have referred to a few of the most prominent evils of our present mode of female Dress.
The trees will be torn up by the roots, and even the "world tree" will tremble from its roots to its topmost boughs. At last the quivering earth will sink beneath the waters of the sea. Then Loki, the spirit of evil, will break loose from the fetters with which the gods have bound him. The frost giants will join him. They will try to make a secret attack on the gods.
Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops, as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life.
It is no less than I have deserved, perhaps; though, could you know all, I am sure you would judge me leniently. But at least I can give you some small proof of my love. Let me first release you from those irons." He set the lantern on the floor, drew a small key from his pocket and unlocked his son's fetters. "Thank you.
Shall we not turn away from this hour and go back into our business, into our offices, into the shops, into the crowded streets, bearing new thoughts of the lives that we might live, feeling the fetters on our hands and feet, feeling many things as fetters which we have thought of as the ornament and glory of our life, determined to be unsatisfied forever until these fetters shall be stricken off and we have entered into the full liberty which comes to those alone who are dedicated to the service of God, to the completion of their own nature, to the acceptance of the grace of Christ, and to the attainment of the eternal glory of the spiritual life, first here and then hereafter, never hereafter, it may be, except here and now, certainly here and now, as the immediate, pressing privilege and duty of our lives?
It is this inward fire rather than any outward pressure that prompts the captive spirit to break loose from the fetters of the unmoving giant, custom, the greatest of all tyrants, who grows stronger as he grows older.
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