But though all the prints, that have been mentioned, were hung up in frames on the motives severally assigned to them, no others were to be seen as their companions.  It is in short not the practice[38] of the society to decorate their houses in this manner.

[Footnote 38:  There are still individual exceptions.  Some Quakers have come accidentally into possession of printings and engravings in frame, which, being innocent in their subject and their lesson, they would have thought it superstitious to discard.]

Prints in frames, if hung up promiscuously in a room, would be considered as ornamental furniture, or as furniture for shew.  They would therefore come under the denomination of superfluities; and the admission of such, in the way that other people admit them would be considered as an adoption of the empty customs or fashions of the world.

But though the Quakers are not in the practice of hanging up prints in frames, yet there are amateurs among them, who have a number and variety of prints in their possession.  But these appear chiefly in collections, bound together in books, or preserved in book covers, and not in frames as ornamental furniture for their rooms.  These amateurs, however, are but few in number.  The Quakers have in general only a plain and useful education.  They are not brought up to admire such things, and they have therefore in general but little taste for the fine and masterly productions of the painters’ art.

Neither would a person, in going through the houses of the Quakers, find any portraits either of themselves, or of any of their families, or ancestors, except, to the latter case, they had been taken before they became Quakers.  The first Quakers never had their portraits taken with their own knowledge and consent.  Considering themselves as poor and helpless creatures, and little better than dust and ashes, they had but a mean idea of their own images.  They were of opinion also, that pride and self-conceit would be likely to arise to men from the view, and ostentatious parade, of their own persons.  They considered also, that it became them, as the founders of the society, to bear their testimony against the vain and superfluous fashions of the world.  They believed also, if there were those whom they loved, that the best method of shewing their regard to these would be not by having their fleshly images before their eyes, but by preserving their best actions in their thoughts, as worthy of imitation; and that their own memory, in the same manner, should be perpetuated rather in the loving hearts, and kept alive in the edifying conversation of their descendants, than in the perishing tablets of canvas, fixed upon the walls of their habitations.  Hence no portraits are to be seen of many of those great and eminent men in the society, who are now mingled with the dust.

These ideas, which thus actuated the first Quakers on this subject, are those of the Quakers as a body at the present day.  There may be here and there an individual, who has had a portrait of some of his family taken.  But such instances may be considered as rare exceptions from the general rule.  In no society is it possible to establish maxims, which shall influence an universal practice.