SECTION I.

Funerals—­Most nations have paid extravagant attention to their dead—­The moderns follow their example—­This extravagance, or the pageantry of funerals, discarded by the Quakers—­Their reasons for it—­Plainness of Quaker-funerals.

If we look into the history of the world, we shall find, from whatever cause it has arisen, whether from any thing connected with our moral feelings, such as love, gratitude, or respect, or from vanity, or ostentation, that almost all nations, where individuals have been able to afford it, have incurred considerable expense in the interment of their dead.  The Greeks were often very extravagant in their funerals.  Many persons, ornamented with garlands, followed the corpse, while others were employed in singing and dancing before it.  At the funerals of the great, among the Romans, couches were carried, containing the waxen or other images of the family of the deceased, and hundreds joined in the procession.  In our own times, we find a difference in the manner of furnishing or decorating funerals, though but little in the intention of making them objects of outward show.  A bearer of plumes precedes the procession.  The horses employed are dressed in trappings.  The hearse follows ornamented with plumes of feathers, and gilded and silvered with gaudy escutcheons, or the armorial bearings of the progenitors of the deceased.  A group of hired persons range themselves on each side of the hearse and attendant carriages, while others close the procession.  These again are all of them clad in long cloaks, or furnished, in regular order, with scarfs and hat-bands.  Now all these outward appendages, which may be called the pageantry of funerals, the Quakers have discarded, from the time of their institution, in the practice of the burial of their dead.

The Quakers are of opinion, that funeral processions should be made, if any thing is to be made of them, to excite serious reflections, and to produce lessons of morality in those who see them.  This they conceive to be best done by depriving the dead body of all ornaments and outward honours.  For, stripped in this manner, they conceive it to approach the nearest to its native worthlessness or dust.  Such funerals, therefore, may excite in the spectator a deep sense of the low and debased condition of man.  And his feelings will be pure on the occasion, because they will be unmixed with the consideration of the artificial distinctions of human life.  The spectator too will be more likely, if he sees all go undistinguished to the grave, to deduce for himself the moral lesson, that there is no true elevation of one above another, only as men follow the practical duties of virtue and religion.  But what serious reflections, or what lessons of morality, on the other hand, do the funerals of the world produce, if accompanied with pomp and splendour?  To those who have sober and serious minds, they produce a kind of pity, that is