Another text also appeared to him decisive against dancing and its inseparable concomitants; “woe unto them who chaunt unto the sound of the viol, and invent unto themselves instruments of music, as did David.” The original word which we translate _chaunt_, signifies according to him, _to quaver, to divide, to articulate,_ and may, he says, as well be applied to the management of the feet, as to the modulations of the voice. This interpretation is supported by the Septuagint, and by the Arabic version; but suppose it be disputed, he says, “yet this much will not be denied, that the text is pointedly enough against that without which dancing cannot well be carried on, I mean, instrumental music.” He might have read in Burton that “nothing was so familiar in France as for citizens wives, and maids to dance a round in the streets, and often too for want of better instruments to make good music of their own voices and dance after it.” Ben Jonson says truly “that measure is the soul of a dance, and Tune the tickle-foot thereof,” but in case of need, the mouth can supply its own music. It is true the Scripture says “there is a time to dance;” but this he explains as simply meaning “that human life is a variegated scene.” Simple readers must they be who can simply understand it thus, to the exclusion of the literal sense. Adam Clarke has not remembered here that the Psalms enjoin us to praise the Lord with tabret and harp and lute, the strings and the pipe, and the trumpet and the loud cymbals, and to praise his name in the dance, and that David danced before the Ark. And though he might argue that Jewish observances are no longer binding, and that some things which were _permitted_ under the Jewish dispensation are no longer lawful, he certainly would not have maintained that any thing which was _enjoined_ among its religious solemnities, can now in itself be sinful. I grant, he says, “that a number of motions and steps, circumscribed by a certain given space, and changed in certain quantities of time, may be destitute of physical and moral evil. But it is not against these things abstractedly that I speak. It is against their concomitant and consequent circumstances; the undue, the improper mixture of the sexes; the occasions and opportunities afforded of bringing forth those fruits of death which destroy their own souls, and bring the hoary heads of their too indulgent parents with sorrow to the grave.”