This is one in a series from Jaques-Benigne Bossuet’s Elevations on the Mysteries, and specifically the Fifth Day. There is more here on the Bossuet Project.
And the Lord God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife, and clothed them. Man becomes not only mortal, but exposed, by his mortality, to all the injuries of the air from which a thousand kinds of diseases are born. This is the source of the clothes that luxury makes so beautiful; the shame of nakedness has begun. Infirmity spread them all over the body; luxury wants to enrich them and mixes softness and pride. O man! come back to your origin! Why do you puff yourself up in your clothes? God first gives you nothing but skins for you to wear; poorer than the animals whose furs are natural to them, infirm and naked that you are, you find yourself having to borrow first; your lack is infinite; you borrow from everywhere to adorn yourself. But let us go to the beginning, and see the principle of luxury; after all, it is based on need: one tries in vain to disguise this weakness by accumulating the superfluity for the necessity.
Man has used the same in all the other of his needs, which he has tried to forget and cover by adorning them. Houses which are decorated by architecture, in their depths, are only a shelter against the snow and the storms, and the other injuries of the air; the furniture is, at their root, only a cover against the cold; these beds made so beautiful are, after all, only a retreat to support weakness and relieve work by sleep: it is necessary every day to go to die, and to pass so much of our life in this nothingness.
Positive Infinity 