Quaker-women should have been found in the use of a colour, which is so unlike any other which they now use in their dress.  Upon the whole, if the females were still to retain the use of the black hood and the green apron, and the men were to discard the stays and loops for their hats, we should find that persons of both sexes in the society, but particularly such as are antiquated, or as may be deemed old fashioned in it, would approach very near to the first or primitive Quakers in their appearance, both as to the sort and to the shape, and to the colour of their clothes.  Thus has George Fox, by means of the advice he gave upon this subject, and the general discipline which he introduced into the society, kept up for a hundred and fifty years, against the powerful attacks of the varying fashions of the world, one steady, and uniform, external appearance among his descendants; an event, which neither the clergy by means of their sermons, nor other writers, whether grave or gay, were able to accomplish during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and which none of their successors have been able to accomplish from that time to the present.

SECT III.

The world usually make objections to the Quaker-dress—­the charge is that there is a preciseness in it which is equivalent to the worshipping of forms—­the truth of this charge not to be ascertained but by a knowledge of the heart—­but outward facts mate against it-such as the origin of the Quaker-dress—­and the Quaker-doctrine on dress—­doctrine of christianity on this subject—­opinion of the early christians upon it—­reputed advantages of the Quaker-dress.

I should have been glad to have dismissed the subject of the Quaker-dress in the last section, but so many objections are usually made against it, that I thought it right to stop for a while to consider them in the present place.  Indeed, if I were to choose a subject, upon which the world had been more than ordinarily severe on the Quakers, I should select that of their dress.  Almost every body has something to say upon this point.  And as in almost all cases, where arguments are numerous, many of them are generally frivolous, so it has happened in this also.  There is one, however, which it is impossible not to notice upon this subject.

The Quakers, it is confessed by their adversaries, are not chargeable with the same sort of pride and vanity, which attach to the characters of other people, who dress in a gay manner, and who follow the fashions of the world, but it is contended, on the other hand, that they are justly chargeable with a preciseness, that is disgusting, in the little particularities of their cloathing.  This precise attention to particularities is considered as little better than the worshipping of lifeless forms, and is usually called by the world the idolatry of the Quaker-dress.