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.
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