Untitled article

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, July 16, 1867

Round Dances.—The following discloses another of the means by which Satan is fast drawing the world into the lowest depths of moral pollution.

The Baltimore Episcopal Methodist has an article on the subject of the condemnation, by the plenary council of the Catholic Church, of certain fashionable dances. The Methodist takes sides with the council in the discussion that has ensued. We quote:

“Nor are we ignorant of round dances as practiced now. We have observed them at Saratoga, night after night, until we knew all we wished to know about them. An old doctor, accustomed for many years to see the unvarnished side of society, is not likely to be over-prudish and fastidious about corporeal exhibitions; but if Esculapius had lived until now, he would not have thought it proper to look at the phenomena of the polka as we saw it at Saratoga, except as a permitted study in animal physiology or moral pathology. The young ladies who were handled and swung about there night after night might have been perfectly innocent of all evil,—we trust they were,—but if we were young and marriageable, we would no more think of seeking one of them for a wife than we would select the snow cake in a confectioner’s window for home consumption. It might be a very good cake, but then the association of the ideas of purity with public exposure and irreverent handling has a natural difficulty in it, so great that, from what we have heard fall from gay gentlemen, even the practice of the polka does not overcome it. We know the defense against it. We are entirely familiar with ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’—‘Evil be to him who evil thinks’—but this motto of the gamester is said to have originated under circumstances that contradicted its philosophy, and its use is commonly true to its origin. It is well to have a pure imagination, but to have one purged of common sense is not laudable. The mind that can perceive no evil tendencies in things not positive breaches of the commandments is not only pure, but stupid. The Cordeliers have a legend that, when St. Francis saw a young man stealthily kissing a maiden, he raised his hands to heaven and returned thanks to God that there was so much Christian charity in the world. The saint was so pure that he could imagine no impulse to kissing but Christian sympathy, and discern no spirit in it but elevated religious devotion. Now, we confess that we are not pure enough to be stone blind. We are not to be ‘honi soit’ out of our senses and a knowledge of human nature. We do not think that polkaing has a power to steady the reason, and that waltzing gives a paralytic vertigo to animal nature, or that the German shuffles the intellect into a region of pure elevation inaccessible to the passions. We do not think that gross improprieties become harmless because they are ‘fashionable.’ We think of a waltz much as Byron did, who was not a Puritan. The opinion of the Catholic Council derives great weight from the fact that it is based upon the information obtained in the confessional from one end of the country to the other. The effect of these dances upon the mind and morals, with us, is an inference, with them it is disclosure, and we do not know how its weight is to be resisted by the votaries of the fashion.”