R. L. Dabney was Professor of Systematic and Polemical Theology at Union Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, and a powerful advocate for public theology, as seen in the essay from which these selections are taken. Lamentably, Dabney defended slavery and joined in the Confederate cause (he was chief of staff to General “Stonewall” Jackson), but he was eloquently right on many matters. Deploring the materialism he saw in nineteenth-century America, even among Christians, he called for a radical reduction of personal spending. Even in the 1800s, “keeping up with the Joneses” was a problem.
In a word, the awakening of the Christian conscience of the church to the truth, and to its duty, would reduce all Christians to a life of comfortable simplicity, embellished, among those who possessed taste, by natural and inexpensive elegance, and all else would be retrenched . . . Wealth would be held as too sacred a trust to expend any part of it in anything which was not truly necessary to the highest glory of God in the rational and spiritual welfare of his creatures, our fellow-men.
When a Christian man, who has professed to dedicate himself and his all, body, soul and estate, to the highest glory of God and love of his fellow-creatures, passes by the hundreds of starving poor and degraded sinners around him, the thousands of ignorant at home, and the millions of perishing heathen, whom his money might instrumentally rescue from hell-fire, and sells for a song his safe, strong, comfortable family carriage, and expends hundreds in procuring another, because his rich neighbor is about to outstrip him in this article of equipage; or when he sacrifices his plate and china to buy new at great cost, because the style of the old was a little past . . . is not this sinful waste?
[T]he extent to which the worldly conformity of the church follows on the heels of the advancing luxuries of the world, plainly indicates that something is wrong with us . . . What were commodious and respectable mansions a few years ago, are now dragged away as so much rubbish . . . New and unheard-of indulgences are invented. What our fathers regarded as luxuries almost extravagant, we have accustomed ourselves to look upon as ordinary comforts, almost despised for their cheapness . . . costliness has become the very element of fashion. Because the ornament is monstrously expensive, in proportion to its true utility, therefore it is sought.
And let it be observed, that those who ride on the floodtide of extravagance are not merely those inconsistent persons whose piety is under grievous suspicions on all hands, but often they are those who stand fair and are much esteemed in the church . . . They will admit one extravagance after another, on the plea of usage and the customs of society, and the innocence of the particular indulgence in itself, to the utmost extent to which an apostate world may please to run in its waste of God’s abused bounties.
