3.  ‘Wherefore gird your garments well up from the ground.’  A well-dressed man, a well-dressed woman, is a beautiful sight.  Not over-dressed; not dressed so as to call everybody’s attention to their dress; but dressed decorously, becomingly, tastefully.  Each several piece well fitted on, and all of a piece, till it all looks as if it had grown by nature itself upon the well-dressed wearer.  Be like him—­be like her—­so runs the third head of the etiquette-card.  Be not slovenly and disorderly and unseemly in your livery.  Let not your livery be always falling off, and catching on every bush and briar, and dropping into every pool and ditch.  Hold yourselves in hand, the instruction goes on.  Brace yourselves up.  Have your temper, your tongue, your eyes, your ears, and all your members in control.  And then you will escape many a rent and many a rag; many a seam and many a patch; many a soil and many a stain.  And then also you will be found walking abroad in comeliness and at liberty, while others, less careful, are at home mending and washing and ironing because they went without a girdle when you girt up your garments well off the ground.  Wherefore always gird well up the loins of your mind.

4.  ’And, fourthly, lose not your robes, lest you walk naked and men see your shame’; that is to say, the supreme shame of your soul.  For there is no other shame.  There is nothing else in body or soul to be ashamed about.  There is a nakedness, indeed, that our children are taught to cover; but the Bible is a book for men.  And the only nakedness that the Bible knows about or cares about is the nakedness of the soul.  It was their sudden soul-nakedness that chased Adam and Eve in among the trees of the garden.  And it is God’s pity for soul-naked sinners that has made Him send His Son to cry to us:  ‘I counsel thee,’ He cries, ’to buy of Me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear.  Behold!’ He cries in absolute terror, ’Behold!  I come as a thief!  Blessed is he that walketh and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.’  Were your soul to be stripped naked to all its shame to-morrow; were all your past to be laid out absolutely naked and bare, with all the utter nakedness of your inward life this day; were all your secret thoughts, and all your stealthy schemes, and all your mad imaginations, and all your detestable motives, and all your hatreds like hell, and all your follies like Bedlam to be laid naked—­I suppose the horror of it would make you cry to the rocks and the mountains to cover you this Sabbath night, or the weeds of the nearest sea to wrap you down into its depths.  It would be hell before the time to you if your soul were suddenly to be stripped absolutely bare of its ragged body, and naked of all the thin integuments of time, and were for a single day to stand naked to its everlasting shame.  And it is just because Jesus Christ sees all that as sure as the judgment-day coming to you, that He stands here to-night and calls to you:  I counsel thee!  I counsel thee!  Before it be too late, I again counsel thee!