DANCING TO THE DEVIL. THE GREAT SALTATORIAL SIN. JUST at present many "progressive " preachers are bringing all their powers to bear upon what they denominate the dance evil. Even before Sam Jones began to blackguard the ballroom in his so-called sermons, various Protestant divines were vociferously denouncing this species of divertissement as a worship of that trinity of wickedness-the World, the Flesh and the Devil; but the Cracker peddler of pseudopiety is the recognized Peterthe-Hermit of the anti-saltatorian crusade. There was a time when it was considered a mortal sin to be merry-when professing Christians refrained from harmless jest and healthful laughter lest they displease the Deity. Some ultrapietistic people eschewed ornament, wore unbecoming clothes and cultivated an expression such as pertains to those afflicted with cramp colic or torpid livers. The idea appears to have been that by making themselves and everybody else unnecessarily miserable in this world their ecstasy would be enhanced in the great hereafter. The theater was taboo, the ballroom placed under the ban, the euchre-deck banished and young people expected to do their courting with a solemnity befitting the making of contracts in a coffin-factory. All the joy and sweetness was crushed out of life by the iron hand of a pessimistic orthodoxy; the sunshine of the heart turned into clammy London fog by specters born in the chaotic brain of pious fools; the pleasant valleys and purple hills transformed into monster-bearing deserts, the refreshing springs into bitter pools, the fragrant flowers into cruel 1 |