OUR readers may think that we have given quite enough space to this subject already in our pages. While that is so it is well for them and others to know that Free Presbyterians are not the only people who have condemned and still condemn promiscuous dancing. From the press campaign launched against our Church one would think that a few people in the Highlands of Scotland—narrow-minded with little or none of the spirit of Christ in them—were so benighted as to say that “promiscuous dancing is notoriously a means of fostering the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” It is not so, however, as the following extracts with those already given will clearly show:—
“Take heed of mixed dancing; from dancing people come to dalliance, one with another, and from dalliance to uncleanness. There is, saith Calvin, for the most part some unchaste behaviour in dancing. Dances draw the heart to folly by wanton gestures, by unchaste touches, by lustful looks. Chrysostom did inveigh against mixed dances in his time. We read, saith he, of a marriage feast, and of virgins going before with lamps, but of dancing there we read not. Many have been ensnared with dancing, as the Duke of Normandy and others. ‘Dancing is for adulteresses, not for the chaste,’ says Ambrose. Chrysostom says: ‘Where dancing is, there the devil is.’ I speak chiefly of mixed dancing; and whereas we read of dancing in Scripture, those were sober and modest. They were not mixed dances, but pious and religious, being usually accompanied with singing of praise to God.”—Watson’s Body of Divinity.
“Add dancing, a thing condemned by the people of God as no honest recreation, at least when in companies that are mixed, and as we call it promiscuous dancing, such as used to be at marriages and the like occasions, both of old, as may be seen in the canons of several councils, as also of late, by our own and other Reformed Churches. I shall say these things in short, of it—First, that you will not find it mentioned in Scripture, in the person of any of the godly. It becometh Herodias’s daughter more than the professors of religion. Second, that it will be readily found to indispose for the exercise of godliness, and so be inconsistent, or at least, hardly consistent with either a pious and lively or a sober frame of spirit. Third, that it marreth not only the gravity of persons for the time, putting them into a sort of regular distraction, but lesseneth the esteem of such persons, this insobriety being like a deadly fly that maketh the box of ointment (if any be) to stink. Fourth, that in the Scripture examples we find this sort of dancing only among profane and loose people, and recorded also as a piece of their stain or blot, rendering them someway infamous, and oftentimes, also, it has snares waiting upon it, as in the Israelites among themselves (Exod. xxxii.), and in the daughters of Moab with the people of Israel, and in that of Herodias’s daughter; some also suppose those whom Dinah went forth to see (Gen. xxxiv.) were thus employed at some feast, or some other solemnity where she was ensnared.”—Durham on the Ten Commandments.
“Earthly pleasure—this is a smiling, dazzling idol that has ten thousand worshippers. Lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God, what have you to do any more with this idol? Sometimes it is a gross idol. The theatre is one of its idols; there it sits enthroned. The tavern is another, where its swilling staggering votaries sing its praise. What have you to do with these things . . . What shall I say of games, cards, dice, dancing? I will only say this, that if you love them, you have never tasted the joys of the new creature. If you feel the love of God and the Spirit, you will not lightly sin these joys away amid the vain anxieties of cards or the senseless rattlings of dice.”—Rev. Robert M. M’Cheyne.
We have lying before us a pamphlet, issued by the Reformed Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., setting forth the attitude of various denominations in that country to dancing. Henry W. Stough in his Across the Deadline of Amusements is quoted as saying: “Every religious denomination of importance in the United States (except the Mormon Church) at one time or another has gone on record against the dance. Space forbids the printing of resolution after resolution of these many ecclesiastical bodies.” What Mr. Stough says about space also applies to our case but we cannot refrain from giving one of these resolutions from Moore’s Digest of Presbyterian Law (1898 edition):—”Resolved, That the fashionable amusement of promiscuous dancing is so entirely unscriptural and eminently and exclusively that of ‘the world which lieth in wickedness,’ and so wholly inconsistent with the spirit of Christ, and with the propriety of Christian deportment and that purity of heart which His followers are bound to maintain as to render it not only improper and injurious for professing Christians either to partake in it, or to qualify their children for it by teaching them the art; but also to call for the faithful and judicious exercise of discipline on the part of church sessions when any of the members of their churches have been guilty.”
In view of the reference made in our last issue to the attitude of the Reformed Churches to promiscuous dancing it would take up too much of our space to quote from their rules of discipline so we content ourselves with a quotation from the Discipline of the Reformed Churches of France on the subject—”All dances shall be suppressed, and such as make a trade of dancing, or make custom of being present at dances, having been sundry times admonished, in case they prove contumacious and rebellious, they shall be excommunicated, and all consistories (kirk-sessions) are charged to see that this canon is most heedfully kept and observed, and in the name of God, and by the authority of this Synod (Paris, 1559), that it be read publicly in their Churches” (Quick’s Synodicon, I. lvii.).
From these quotations and those already given in a previous issue it will be seen that Free Presbyterians are not the only Christians who have strongly condemned “promiscuous dancing” and they have no reason to be ashamed of the company with whom they find themselves in this matter.