is not what we can imagine them to be, but what they always have been,
will be, and must be, in such a world as this, to render them pleasurable
to those who patronize them. Strip them bare until they stand in the
simple innocence to which their defenders' arguments would reduce them
and the world would not have them." A Roman Catholic priest testifies
that "the confessional revealed the fact that nineteen out of every twenty
women who fall can trace the beginning of their state to the modern dance."



V.
THEATER-GOING.

WITH drunkenness, gambling, and dancing, theater-going dates from
the beginning of history, and with these it is not only questionable in
morals, but it is positively bad. Every one who knows any thing about
the institution of the theater, as such, knows that it always has been
corrupting in its influence. Not only those who attend the theater
pronounce it bad, as a whole, but it is frowned upon by play-writers,
and by actors and actresses themselves. Five hundred years before
Christ, Jew, Pagan, and Christian spoke against the theater. It is
stated on good authority that the dissipations of the theater were
the chief cause of the decadence of ancient Greece. At one time,
Augustus, the emperor of Rome, was asked as a means of public
safety, to suppress the theater. The early Christians held the theater
in such bad repute as to rank it with the heathen temple. And to
these two places they would not go, even to preach the Good News
of Jesus Christ. Nor has the moral tone and character of the theater
improved, even in our day. Dr. Theodore Cuyler, for many years
an experienced pastor in Brooklyn, Says: "The American theater