Charles Spurgeon on Fashion and Respectability

From the inside cover of Tullian Tchividjian’s new book, Unfashionable, which I’ve been really enjoying over the last week and am about half-way through:

The great guide of this world is fashion and its god is respectability–two phantoms at which brave men laugh! How many of you look around society to know what to do? You watch the general current and then float upon it! You study the popular breeze and shift your sails to suit it. True men do not so! You ask, “Is it fashionable? If it is fashionable, it must be done.” Fashion is the law of multitudes, but it is nothing more than the common consent of fools. –CHARLES SPURGEON

This book is engaging and very practically helpful. Tullian’s main point is that Christians make a difference in this world by being different from this world; not by being the same. The book carries endorsements from D.A. Carson, J.I. Packer, Michael Horton, Chuck Colson, and many others, as well as a Foreword by Tim Keller. I’ll have more to say next Monday as I’m participating in a “blog tour” of the book.