Christian Theology - Media Sabda Org

away the veil from thy heart, and to give thee that deep sense of guilt
which shall oblige thee to flee for refuge to the hope which is set before
thee in the gospel of Christ.
DANCING.
DANCING was to me a perverting influence, an unmixed moral evil; for
although, by the mercy of God, it led me not to depravity of manners, it
greatly weakened the moral principle, drowned the voice of a well
instructed conscience, and was the first cause of impelling me to seek my
happiness in this life. Every thing yielded to the disposition it had
produced, and every thing was absorbed by it. I have it justly in
abhorrence for the moral injury it did me; and I can testify, (as far as my
own observations have extended, and they have had a pretty wide range,)
I have known it to produce the same evil in others that it produced in me.
I consider it, therefore, as a branch of that worldly education which leads
from heaven to earth, from things spiritual to things sensual, and from
God to Satan. Let them plead for it who will; I know it to be evil and that
only. They who bring up their children in this way, or send them to those
schools where dancing is taught, are consecrating them to the service of
Moloch, and cultivating the passions, so as to cause them to bring forth
the weeds of a fallen nature, with an additional rankness, deep-rooted
inveteracy, and inexhaustible fertility. Nemo sobrius saltat, "No man in
his senses will dance," said Cicero, a heathen: shame on those Christians
who advocate a cause by which many sons have become profligate, and
many daughters have been ruined!
After so fatal an example of this, (the beheading of John the Baptist,)
can we doubt whether balls are not snares for souls; destructive of
chastity, modesty, and sometimes even of humanity itself; and a
pernicious invention to excite the most criminal passions? How many on
such occasions have sacrificed their chastity, and then, to hide their
shame, have stifled the human being and the parent, and, by direct or
indirect means, have put a period to the innocent offspring of their
connections! "Unhappy mother who exposes her daughter to the same