Now, I do not know that it would be right for me to denounce
indiscriminately all who perform publicly in places of amusement in our
cities and towns, yet it is safe for me to say that a dancing girl,
however loudly her fame may be trumpeted by the newspapers, finds her
professional reputation every-where a bar to her reception into good
society. Why should it be so? It certainly is not because of the mere
publicity of professional life. If it were, then Miss Dickinson and Miss
Evans, and scores of others, would find themselves in the same
condemnation, instead of being honored and applauded. Why a female
public lecturer should be respected, and a female public dancer despised
and shunned, I can not understand, unless there is something in dancing
itself, or in the character of those who have made it their profession,
that has merited condemnation. Ladies of the highest respectability go
to hear the lecturer, and at the close crowd around the desk to be
introduced to her; other ladies, certainly no more scrupulous in regard
to their associations, go to see the dancer perform, and the next day
will not look at her in the street. What makes the difference? Will the
apologist for dancing explain?
3. _A love for dancing parties and balls is universally deemed
inconsistent with the seriousness and devotion which characterize a true
Christian._
Dancing is regarded as the favorite diversion of the vain and the
frivolous. Nominal Christians may be found at balls and dancing
assemblies, but they are persons who have no weight of Christian
character, and exert no influence in favor of religion. The world,
unconvicted and careless, rather likes such professors of religion,
because their example is an opiate wherewith to quiet an occasional pang
of conscience. The worldly and the prayerless think more favorably of
themselves and of their prospects of heaven when they see that Church
members resemble them so closely. But when the worldly man is convinced
of sin, and desires to find pardon, he never sends for one of these
unfaithful professors to give him spiritual counsel. When the wicked are
about to die, they do not want prayer offered at their bedside by any of
these fiddling, dancing, wine-bibbing, honorary members of the Church.
They name men and women of undoubted piety. They suspect those who can
join them in their follies and feel no condemnation. They do not
estimate very highly a Christian profession which exerts so little
control over those that make it. Nay, rebuke a scorner for his sins, and
in many cases he will seek to defend himself by a sneering allusion to
those very professors of religion who verily believe that they were
making capital for their Church by showing that it can not be suspected
of being "Puritanic."
4. _Dancing involves undesirable associations._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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