Reader, if you go to a ball or dance, knowing it to be such, you are a participant in all the sins and crimes which would not have been committed, if such ball or dance had never been.  So if the gathering be for a sinless, harmless purpose, and you find, after arriving at the place, that there is to be a dance, and you do not leave immediately, you will be just as guilty as though you had gone with full knowledge of what was to be.  The encouragement and endorsement of your presence makes you just as guilty as those who join in the dance.  There is no difference, except in degree, between the select parlor dance and the masquerade ball, because the one is the stepping stone to the other.  Not one in ten thousand have done their first dancing at the masquerade ball, just as not one in ten thousand ever took their first drink of whiskey in a drinking saloon.  But let it be remembered that hundreds of thousands have taken their first drink of wine or whiskey at a ball or dance.

One of the greatest sins committed by children and young people is disobedience to parents. It is one of the greatest, because it is one of the first, and because if cultivated it becomes a cesspool of iniquity.  It is a pandora box, out of which ten thousand troubles, trials, difficulties, sins and crimes will come.  I claim that the love of dancing is the most fruitful source of disobedience to parents to be found beneath the sun, because it becomes a ruling passion.  If anything will cause a child to disobey its parents, it is to forbid them going to a ball or dance when their heart is set upon it. They go and then deny it.  For all the disobedience brought about in this way, the parents are generally far more to blame than the children because it is the parents’ fault that they have ever learned to dance.  Some parents have an idea that dancing is a necessary branch of education, that it makes their children graceful, but never look far enough down the line to see that they are opening the way to graceful disobedience, graceful liars, graceful thieves, graceful gamblers, graceful drunkards, graceful prostitutes, graceful whoremongers and to every sin and crime that men and women can commit beneath the sun.  They are opening the very gates of hell to their own children.

MANY, if not all, of the following sins and crimes are committed at every dance, hop or ball, and every one present, whether participating in the dance or not, is equally guilty with the perpetrators of all the sins and crimes, which would not have been committed if there had been no such gathering: 

SAMPLES OF FRUIT FOUND ON THE TREE OF DANCING: 

ENVY.

JEALOUSY.

PRIDE.

DECEIT.

DISOBEDIENCE TO PARENTS

BACKBITING.