No other Christian community has proved so strikingly the value in worship of the beautiful sacrament of silence, that universal liturgy in which all nations can unite; where ignorant and learned men come together on a like basis. Yet the very fact that in speaking of this we need to emphasize the worth of "Living silence," shows that too often, even here, men have but honoured a dead silence, making an idol of the sacrament which was only a means to an end, not an end in itself. We may see even more clearly how easy it is for the form to become a bondage in the history of [p.66] another strange Quaker sacrament, that of the "Plain dress" of the middle nineteenth century. There is no need to tell how, in the case of this custom, the protest against changing fashions became itself the most tyrannous of fashions. What is especially interesting to us now, is to note that the dress which was an outward sign of inward grace became to be considered as, in a sense, holy itself. A young man or woman would wear the ordinary dress of the day, and suddenly some time of decision would come, a crisis in the inner life, and perfectly naturally the change would be marked by the adoption in the plain dress of the older generation. And it even became customary to associate the length of the hat brim with the holiness of the wearer's life; the truer to Quaker principles he was, the longer was the brim. It has been said that you may find in a journal written seventy years ago such an entry as this: "I think I can honestly, yet in all humility, say that in the past year there has been a growth in grace, and I have ventured to add a quarter of an inch to the brim of my hat." We smile; yet for some of us at least that ancient costume is so redolent of beautiful memories that we can scarce bear to laugh at its vagaries; we know too well the sacramental efficacy of the old Friend's bonnet, which forever recalls the goodness and love of the face beneath it. It is strange that in the ancient Church of Rome men should have come to think in much the same [p.67] way of the peculiar habits of the religious orders, regarding the monk's dress itself as something sacred, which an unworthy man dishonoured, and which actually helped its wearer to be holier in his life just as the old Quaker dress was felt by many to help them to be more consistent in all their ways with the ideal which they strove to realize. So strong was this feeling that men who were not members of an Order sometimes obtained as a privilege to wear for a time the cord, to die in the habit, or even to be buried in it, the dress itself being felt to be sacramental.