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Robert Lewis Dabney (1829–1898) was one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the 19th century. A Southern Presbyterian, he was a leacher, statesman, writer, and social critic, as well as theologian, and taught at Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. In the American Civil War he once served as Chief of Staff to the Confederate general “Stonewall” Jackson. Dabney’s contributions have been dampened partially by his vigorous defense of the pre-Civil War South’s institution of slavery; however, his work, especially his Systematic Theology, has been highly regarded by scholars from Benjamin Warfield to Karl Barth.

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; or when he pulls down his commodious dwelling to expend thousands in building another, because the first was unfashionable; is not this sinful waste? When hundreds and thousands of God’s money are abstracted from the wants of a perishing world, for which the Son of God died, to purchase the barbaric finery of jewelry, as offensive to good taste as to Christian economy, jewelry which keeps out no cold blast in winter, and no scorching heat in summer, which fastens no needful garment and promotes no bodily comfort, is not this extravagance? When large sums of money are expended on exotics not half so pretty as a clover blossom nor so fragrant as a common apple-tree flower, whose only merit is that no other lady in town has obtained one, what is this but extravagance? We are deeply convinced that if our principle of self-dedication were honestly carried through the usages and indulgences of fashionable society, a multitude of common superfluities would be cut off. Indeed, we doubt not that the depth to which it would cut, and the extent to which it would convict the fashionable Christian world of delinquency, would be the grand argument against it.

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. The whole of that immense wealth now sacrificed to luxury would be laid on the altar of religious benevolence, or devoted to works of public utility. The real politeness and true refinements of life would be only promoted by the change. Every useful branch of education, all training by which mind and body are endued with a higher efficiency for God’s service, would be secured, cost what it might. Every truly ennobling taste would receive a simple and natural cultivation. But the material luxuries and adornments of life would be sternly retrenched, and Christian society would be marked in dress, in equipage, in buildings, sacred and domestic, in food, and in every other sensuous gratification, by a Spartan simplicity, united with a pure and chaste decency. 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.

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