The latter cannot do this for the following reasons.  The Quakers reject all such ornaments, because they believe them to be specifically condemned by Christianity.  The words of the apostles Paul and Peter, have been quoted both by Fox, Penn, Barclay, and others, upon this subject.  But surely, if the Christian religion positively condemns the use of them in one, it condemns the use of them in another.  And how can any one, professing this religion, sell that, the use of which he believes it to have forbidden?  The Quakers also have rejected all ornaments of the person, as we find by their own writers, on account of their immoral tendency; or because they are supposed to be instrumental in puffing up the creature, or in the generation of vanity and pride.  But if they have rejected the use of them upon this principle, they are bound, as Christians, to refuse to sell them to others.  Christian love, and the Christian obligation to do as we would wish to be done by, positively enjoin this conduct.  For no man, consistently with this divine law and obligation, can sow the seeds of moral disease in his neighbour’s mind.

And here I may observe, that though there are trades, which may be innocent in themselves, yet Quakers may make them objectionable by the manner in which they may conduct themselves in disposing of the articles which belong to them.  They can never pass them off, as other people do, by the declaration that they are the fashionable articles of the day.  Such words ought never to come out of Quakers’ mouths; not so much because their own lives are a living protest against the fashions of the world, as because they cannot knowingly be instrumental in doing a moral injury to others.  For it is undoubtedly the belief of the Quakers, as I had occasion to observe in a former volume, that the following of such fashions, begets a worldly spirit, and that in proportion as men indulge this spirit, they are found to follow the loose and changeable morality of the world, instead of the strict and steady morality of the gospel.

That some such positions as these may be fixed upon for the farther regulation of commercial concerns among the Quakers, is evident, when we consider the example of many estimable persons in this society.

The Quakers, in the early times of their institution, were very circumspect about the nature of their occupations, and particularly as to dealing in superfluities and ornaments of the person.  Gilbert Latey was one of those who bore his public testimony against them.  Though he was only a tailor, he was known and highly respected by king James the Second.  He would not allow his servants to put any corruptive finery upon the clothes which he had been ordered to make for others.  From Gilbert Latey I may pass to John Woolman.  In examining the Journal of the latter I find him speaking thus:  “It had been my general practice to buy and sell things really useful.  Things that served chiefly to please