finement, any considerable class
of the community, by way of testifying against the "Mammon-god," and
escaping from what he calls "Vanity's Workhouse and Ragfair,"
where doubtless some of them are toiled and whipped and hoodwinked
sufficiently,--will sheathe themselves in close-fitting cases of
Leather? The idea is ridiculous in the extreme. Will Majesty lay aside
its robes of state, and Beauty its frills and train-gowns, for a second
skin of tanned hide? By which change Huddersfield and Manchester, and
Coventry and Paisley, and the Fancy-Bazaar, were reduced to hungry
solitudes; and only Day and Martin could profit. For neither would
Teufelsdrockh's mad daydream, here as we presume covertly intended, of
levelling Society (_levelling_ it indeed with a vengeance, into one
huge drowned marsh!), and so attaining the political effects of Nudity
without its frigorific or other consequences,--be thereby realized.
Would not the rich man purchase a waterproof suit of Russia Leather;
and the high-born Belle step forth in red or azure morocco, lined with
shamoy: the black cowhide being left to the Drudges and Gibeonites of
the world; and so all the old Distinctions be re-established?

Or has the Professor his own deeper intention; and laughs in his sleeve
at our strictures and glosses, which indeed are but a part thereof?

CHAPTER II. CHURCH-CLOTHES.

Not less questionable is his Chapter on _Church-Clothes_, which has
the farther distinction of being the shortest in the Volume. We here
translate it entire:--

"By Church-Clothes, it need not be premised that I mean infinitely more
than Cassocks and Surplices; and do not at all mean the mere haberdasher
Sunday Clothes that men go to Church in. Far from it! Church-Clothes
are, in our vocabulary, the Forms, the _Vestures_, under which men have
at various periods embodied and represented for themselves the Religious
Principle; that is to say, invested the Divine Idea of the World with a
sensible and practically active Body, so that it might dwell among them
as a living and life-giving WORD.

"These are unspeakably the most important of all the vestures and
garnitures of Human Existence. They are first spun and woven, I may say,
by that wonder of wonders, SOCIETY; for it is still only when 'two or
three are gathered together,' that Religion, spiritually existent,
and indeed indestructible, however latent, in each, first outwardly
manifests itself (as with 'cloven tongues of fi