Evangelist Criticizes Women's Dress — 'Nearly Naked'

1914

Oliver on Dress

Evangelist Makes a Few Remarks While Sojourning on Pacific Coast

Rev. French E. Oliver, who conducted the Union Evangelistic Campaign in this town, a short time ago, has come into public notice on the Pacific coast, where he is spending a season for the benefit of his health, through severe arraignment of women for immodesty in dress.

Among his utterance on the subject, while at Venice, were the following: "Most assuredly I would say that women are losing their modesty. To the styles adopted by some of the women I attribute their downfall and the crowding of the divorce courts. Think of the fact that there are over one million divorce suits filed in the United States in one year. Women are dressing to attract the attention of men, and it is this situation that results in the downfall of both. Seventy per cent of the women who go in bathing daily have scant enough clothing to shield their nakedness. No stockings, low cut waists and neither garments that do not reach to their knees. Could that be considered womanly modesty? It is the same at the Eastern beaches that are at Venice. The more aristocratic the resort the more prevalent the lack of modesty.

"One reason why the world is not as good to-day as it was years ago is that the same religion is not being preached. There is too much modernism in present day religion. Religion can not be changed with the fashions, for there is but one religion and that is the one that was first preached."

—The Van Wert Daily Bulletin, Van Wert, OH, Aug. 22, 1914, p. 2.

Truth

1895

"Truth, like food, is valuable to men as they are prepared to digest and appropriate it. Only as they were able to bear it, did Christ reveal the truth to His disciples, and He distinctly declared that, 'He had many things to say to them, but they could not bear them now,' To the inner circle to whom it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom, He uttered plainly what He could utter to others only in parables. He withheld His disciples from speaking of the truth which they were prepared to confess — namely, that He was the Christ of God — because there would come the puzzling and seemingly contradictory fact that He must be denied, betrayed and crucified. Till the crowning proofs of His divinity by the resurrection were in, the people were not ready to accept the truth which the disciples saw. Truth may as surely be damagingly misused as food may." — Christian Intelligencer (Baptist).