First Reply

Robert L. Berry - February 18

Mountain Grove, Missouri

Jennie C. Rutty
Pomona, California

Dear Sister:

May God bless you. Your letter and article at hand. Your approach to the necktie question is wrong. You talk of what the sisters will think of it, if the brethren wear neckties, and it appears as if they would take advantage of it to wear things. I have a very poor opinion of the experience of a sister who would try to take advantage of what anybody done, man or woman, to put on adornment. And why go so far away to solve a problem? Why not solve each problem on its own merits? Those who fight the tie always go away off and say that if we do not condemn the tie, because the Word does not say anything about it, then we can’t condemn feathers, etc. What has that got to do with the question at hand? Let us settle the tie question first and then, if feathers constitute a question, settle that. The tie question is no moral question, it is a common article of dress. Why make such an ado about it? Suppose we would cut off the ribbon about a sister’s neck. Ribbon is freely worn and nothing said—nothing to say—the same with the necktie. All our teaching against the tie was human teaching, with no authority from the Bible. It was sectarian in its effect. Your article read, Don’t see anything wrong particularly with it. Of course, your argument is weak in so far as relates to the tie question. Of course, the spirit will lead, but it leads to the truth, not away from it. Those who wear the ties are nearer the truth than we who don’t. There is no spirit of compromise in the matter. This reformation is bound to be clear from sectarianism. The little narrow ideas, of some would deflect it from its true course, of truth, only into a channel made by man. Bro. Orr is awfully wrong in his tract. It is as crooked as it can be. It is framed in nice religion phrases, but its corrupt origin is plain to anyone who can comprehend a principle of truth. The theory that he advances is as thin as the mist he talks about. He can’t quote one text to support it.

Sister Rutty, what do you mean by letting such a thin argument find weight with you? Pardon my personal address to you. God showed me clearly, unmistakably, sometime ago the truth on this question. I neither was for, nor against the tie, but when some took a stand against the tie, I at once saw that they were making an issue of a thing, a test of a thing that had no warrant in the scriptures, so I rebuked it at the General Western Camp Meeting, and I certainly am against that crooked spirit that would divide over a necktie.

With much holy love,
Your brother,
R. L. Berry