368. Social Dissipation

Social Dissipation

Mat_14:6 : ’93When Herod’92s birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod.’94

It is the anniversary of Herod’92s birthday. The palace is lighted. The highways leading thereto are all ablaze with the pomp of invited guests. Lords, captains, merchant princes, the mighty men of the land, are coming to mingle in the festivities. The table is spread with all the luxuries that royal purveyors can gather. The guests, white-robed and anointed and perfumed, come in and sit at the table. Music! The jests evoke roars of laughter. Riddles are propounded. Repartee sparkles. Toasts are drunk. The brain is befogged. The wit rolls on into uproar and blasphemy. They are not satisfied yet. Turn on more light. Pour out more wine. Music! Sound all the trumpets. Clear the floor for a dance. Bring in Salome, the beautiful and accomplished princess. The door opens, and in bounds the dancer. The lords are enchanted. Stand back and make room for the brilliant gyrations. These men never saw such ’93poetry of motion.’94 Their soul whirls in the reel and bounds with the bounding feet. Herod forgets crown and throne and everything but the fascinations of Salome. All the magnificence of his realm is nothing now compared with the splendor that whirls on tiptoe before him. His body sways from side to side, corresponding with the motions of the enchantress. His soul is thrilled with the pulsations of the feet and bewitched with the graceful postures and attitudes more and more amazing. After a while he sits in enchanted silence looking at the flashing, leaping, bounding beauty, and as the dance closes, and the tinkling cymbals cease to clap, and the thunders of applause that shook the palace began to abate, the enchanted monarch swears to the princely performer: ’93Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me I will give it thee, to the half of my kingdom.’94 Now, there was in prison at that time a minister of the Gospel by the name of John the Baptist, and he had been making a great deal of trouble by preaching some very plain and honest sermons. He had denounced the sins of the king and brought down upon him the wrath of the females of the royal household. At the instigation of her mother, Salome takes advantage of the extravagant promise of the king and says, ’93Bring me the head of John the Baptist on a dinner plate.’94

Hark to the sound of feet outside the door and the clatter of swords. The executioners are returning from their awful errand. Open the door. They enter, and they present the platter to Salome. What is on the platter? A new glass of wine to continue the uproarious merriment? No. Something redder and costlier’97the ghastly, bleeding head of John the Baptist, the death glare still in the eye, the locks dabbled with the gore, the features still distressed with the last agony. This woman, who had whirled so gracefully in the dance, bends over the awful burden without a shudder. She gloats over the blood, and with as much indifference as a waiting-maid might take a tray of empty glassware out of the room after an entertainment, Salome carries the dissevered head of John the Baptist, while all the banqueters shout with laughter, and think it a good joke that in so easy and quick a way they have got rid of an earnest and outspoken minister of the Gospel.

Well, there is no harm in a birthday festival. All the kings from Pharaoh’92s time had celebrated such occasions, and why not Herod? No harm in kindling the lights. No harm in spreading the banquet. No harm in arousing music. But from the riot and wassail that closed the scene of that day every pure nature revolts. I am not this morning to discuss the old question, Is dancing right or wrong? but I am to discuss the question, Does dancing take too much place and occupy too much time in modern society? and in my remarks I hope to carry with me the earnest conviction of all thoughtful persons, and I believe I will. You will all admit’97whatever you think of that style of amusement and exercise’97that from many circles it has crowded out all intelligent conversation. You will also admit that it has made the condition of those who do not dance, either because they do not know how, or because they have not the health to endure it, or because through conscientious scruples they must decline the exercise, very uncomfortable. You will also admit, all of you, that it has passed in many cases from an amusement to a dissipation, and you are easily able to understand the bewilderment of the educated Persian, who, standing in the brilliant circle where there was dancing going on four or five hours, and the guests seemed exhausted, turned to the proprietor of the house and said, ’93Why do you not allow your servants to do this for you?’94 You are also willing to admit, whatever be your idea in regard to the amusement I am speaking of, and whatever be your idea of the old-fashioned square dance and of many of the processional romps in which I can see no evil, that the round dance is administrative of evil and ought to be driven out of all respectable circles. I am by natural temperament and religious theory opposed to the position taken by all those who are horrified at playfulness on the part of the young, and who think that all questions are decided’97questions of decency and morals’97by the position of the feet, while, on the other hand, I can see nothing but ruin, temporal and eternal, for those who go into the dissipations of social life, dissipations which have already despoiled thousands of young men and young women of all that is noble in character and useful in life.

Dancing is the graceful motion of the body adjusted by art to the sound and measures of musical instrument or of the human voice. All nations have danced. The ancients thought that Castor and Pollux taught the art to the Laced’e6monians. But whoever started it, all climes have adopted it. In ancient times they had the festal dance, the military dance, the mediatorial dance, the bacchanalian dance, and queens and lords swayed to and fro in the gardens, and the rough backwoodsman with this exercise awakened the echo of the forest. There is something in the sound of lively music to evoke the movement of the hand and foot, whether cultured or uncultured. Passing down the street we unconsciously keep step to the sound of the brass band, while the Christian in church with his foot beats time while his soul rises upon some great harmony. While this is so in civilized lands, the red men of the forest have their scalp dances, their green-corn dances, their war dances. In ancient times the exercise was so utterly and completely depraved that the church anathemized it. The old Christian fathers expressed themselves most vehemently against it. St. Chrysostom says: ’93The feet were not given for dancing but to walk modestly, not to leap impudently like camels.’94 One of the dogmas of the ancient church reads: ’93A dance is the devil’92s possession, and he that entereth into a dance entereth into his possession. As many paces as a man makes in dancing, so many paces does he make to hell.’94 Elsewhere the old dogmas declared this: ’93The woman that singeth in the dance is the princess of the devil, and those that answer are his clerks, and the beholders are his friends, and the music are his bellows, and the fiddlers are the ministers of the devil. For as when hogs are strayed, if the hogshead call one all assemble together, so when the devil calleth one woman to sing in the dance, or to play on some musical instrument, presently all the dancers gather together.’94 This indiscriminate and universal denunciation of the exercise came from the fact that it was utterly and completely depraved.

But we are not to discuss the customs of the olden times, but customs now. We are not to take the evidence of the ancient fathers, but our own conscience, enlightened by the Word of God, is to be the standard. Bring no harsh criticism upon the young. I would not drive out from their soul the hilarities of life. I do not believe that the inhabitants of ancient Wales, when they stepped to the sound of the rustic harp, went down to ruin. I believe God intended the young people to laugh and romp and play. I do not believe God would have put exuberance in the soul and exuberance in the body if he had not intended they should in some wise exercise it and demonstrate it. If a mother join hands with her children and cross the floor to the sound of music, I see no harm. If a group of friends cross and recross the room to the sound of piano well played, I see no harm. If a company, all of whom are known to host and hostess as reputable, cross and recross the room to the sound of musical instrument, I see no harm. I tried for a long while to see harm in it. I could not see any harm in it. I never will see any harm in it. Our men need to be kept young, young for many years longer than they are kept young. Never since my boyhood days have I had more sympathy with the innocent hilarities of life than I have now. What though we have felt heavy burdens! What though we have had to endure hard knocks! Is that any reason why we should stand in the way of those who, unstung of life’92s misfortunes, are full of exhilaration and full of glee? God bless the young! They will have to wait for many a long year before they hear me say anything that would depress their ardor or clip their wings or make them believe that life is hard and cold and repulsive. It is not. I tell them, judging from my own experience, that they will be treated a great deal better than they deserve. We have no right to grudge the innocent hilarities to the young. As we go on in years let us remember that we had our gleeful times; let us be able to say, ’93We had. our good times, let others have their good times.’94 Let us willingly resign our place to those who are coming after us. I will cheerfully give them everything’97my house, my books, my position in society, my heritage. After the twenty, forty, fifty years we have been drinking out of the cup of this life, do not let us begrudge the passing of it that others may take a drink.

But while all this is so, we can have no sympathy with sinful indulgences, and I am going to speak in regard to some of them, though I should tread on the long trail of some popular vanities. What are the dissipations of social life today, and what are the dissipations of the ballroom? In some cities and in some places they reach all the year round, in other places only in the summer time and at the watering-places. There are dissipations of social life that are cutting a very wide swath with the sickle of death, and hundreds and thousands are going down under these influences, and my subject in application is as wide as the continent and as wide as Christendom. The whirlpool of social dissipation is drawing down some of the brightest craft that ever sailed the sea’97thousands and tens of thousands of the bodies and souls annually consumed in the conflagration of ribbons.

Social dissipation is the abettor of pride, it is the instigator of jealousy, it is the sacrificial altar of health, it is the defiler of the soul, it is the avenue of lust and it is the curse of every town in America. Social dissipation. It may be hard to draw the line and say that this is right on the one side, and that is wrong on the other side. It is not necessary that we do that, for God has put a throne in every man’92s soul, and I appeal to that throne today. When a man does wrong he knows he does wrong, and when he does right he knows he does right, and to that throne that Almighty God erected in the heart of every man and woman I appeal.

As to the physical ruin wrought by the dissipations of social life there can be no doubt. What may we expect of people who work all day and dance all night? After awhile they will be thrown on society nervous, exhausted imbeciles. These people who indulge in the suppers and the midnight revels and then go home in the cold, their limbs unwrapped, will after a while be found to have been written down in God’92s eternal records as suicides, as much suicides as if they had taken their life with a pistol or a knife or strychnine. How many people in America have stepped from the ballroom into the graveyard! Consumptions and swift neuralgias are close on their track. Amid many of the glittering scenes of social life in America diseases stand right and left and balance and chain. The breath of the sepulcher floats up through the perfume, and the froth of Death’92s lips bubbles up in the champagne. I am told that in some parts of this country, in some of the cities, there are parents who have actually given up housekeeping and gone to boarding, that they might give their time illimitably to social dissipations. I have known such cases. I have known family after family blasted in that way in some of the cities where I preached. Father and mother turning their back upon all quiet culture and all the amenities of home, leading forth their entire family in the wrong direction. Annihilated, worse than annihilated’97for there are some things worse than annihilation. I give you the history of more than one family when I say they went on in the dissipations of social life until the father dropped into a lower style of dissipation, and after a while the son was tossed out into society a nonentity, and after a while the daughter eloped with a French dancing-master, and after a while the mother, getting on further and further in years, tries to hide the wrinkles but fails in the attempt, trying all the arts of the belle, an old flirt, a poor, miserable butterfly without any wings.

If there is anything on earth beautiful to me it is an aged woman, her white locks flowing back over the wrinkled brow’97locks not white with frost, as the poets say, but white with the blossoms of the tree of life, in her voice the tenderness of gracious memories, her face a benediction. As grandmother passes through the room the grandchildren pull at her dress, and she almost falls in her weakness; but she has nothing but candy or cake or a kind word for the little darlings. When she gets out of the wagon in front of the house the whole family rush out and cry: ’93Grandma’92s come!’94 and when she goes away from us never to return, there is a shadow on the table and a shadow on the hearth and a shadow on the heart. There is no more touching scene on earth than when grandmother sleeps the last slumber and the little child is lifted up to the casket to give the last kiss, and she says: ’93Good-by, grandma!’94

Oh, there is a beauty in old age. God says so. ’93The hoary head is a crown of glory.’94 Why should people be sorry to get old? The best things, the greatest things I know of, are aged. But if there is anything distressful, it is to see an old woman ashamed of the fact that she is old. What with all the artificial appliances, she is too much for my gravity. I laugh even in church, when I see her coming. The worst-looking bird on earth is a peacock when it has lost its feathers. I would not give one lock of my old mother’92s gray hair for a thousand such caricatures of humanity. And if the life of a worldling, if the life of a disciple given to the world is sad, the close of such a life is simply a tragedy. Let me tell you that the dissipations of social life in America are despoiling the usefulness of a vast multitude of people. What do those people care about the fact that there are whole nations in sorrow and suffering and agony, when they have for consideration the more important question about the size of a glove or the tie of a cravat? Which one of them ever bound up the wounds of the hospital? Which one of them ever went out to care for the poor? Which of them do you find in the haunts of sin distributing tracts. They live on themselves, and it is very poor pasture.

Sybaris was a great city, and it once sent out three hundred horsemen in battle. They had a minstrel who had taught the horses of the army a great trick, and when the old minstrel played a certain tune, the horses would rear and with their front feet seem to beat time to the music. Well, the old minstrel was offended with his country, and he went over to the enemy, and he said to the enemy: ’93You give me the mastership of the army and I will destroy the troops when those horsemen come from Sybaris. So they gave the old minstrel the management, and he taught all the other minstrels a certain tune. Then when the cavalry troop came up the old minstrel and all the other minstrels played a certain tune, and at the most critical moment in the battle when the horsemen wanted to rush to the conflict, the horses reared and beat time to the music with their forefeet, and in disgrace and rout the enemy fled.’94 Ah! my friends, I have seen it again and again’97the minstrels of pleasure, the minstrels of dissipation, the minstrels of godless association have defeated people in the hardest fight of life. Frivolity has lost the battle for ten thousand folk. Oh! what a belittling process to the human mind this everlasting question about dress, this discussion of fashionable infinitesimals, this group looking askance at the glass, wondering with an infinity of earnestness how that last geranium leaf does look’97this shrivelling of a man’92s moral dignity until it is not observable to the naked eye, this Spanish inquisition of a tight shoe, this binding up of an immortal soul in a ruffle, this pitching off of an immortal nature over the rocks when God intended it for great and everlasting uplifting.

You know as well as I do that the dissipations of social life in America today are destroying thousands and tens of thousands of people, and it is time that the pulpits lift their voice against them, for I now prophecy the eternal destruction of all those who enter the rivalry. When did the white, glistening boards of a dissipated ballroom ever become the road to heaven? When was a torch for eternity ever lighted at the chandelier of a dissipated scene? From a table spread after such an excited and desecrated scene who ever went home to pray?

In my parish of Philadelphia there was a young woman brilliant as a spring morning. She gave her life to the world. She would come to religious meetings and under conviction would for a little while begin to pray, and then would rush off again into the discipleship of the world. She had all the world could offer of brilliant social position. One day a flushed and excited messenger asked me to hasten to her house, for she was dying. I entered the room. There were the physicians, there was the mother, there lay this disciple of the world. I asked her some questions in regard to her soul. She made no answer. I knelt down to pray. I rose again, and desiring to get some expression in regard to her eternal interests, I said: ’93Have you any hope?’94 and then for the first her lips moved in a whisper as she said: ’93No hope!’94 Then she died. The world, she served it, and the world helped her not in the last. And I tell the hundreds and thousands of young people, the world will laugh with you when you laugh, and romp with you when you romp, but it will not weep with you when you die.

I wish that I could marshal all the young to an appreciation of the fact that you have an earnest work in life, and your amusements and recreations are only to help you along in that work. At the time of a religious awakening a Christian young woman spoke to a man in regard to his soul’92s salvation. He floated out into the world. After a while she became worldly in her Christian profession. The man said one day, ’93Well, I am as safe as she is. She talked with me about my soul; if she is safe I am safe.’94 Then a sudden accident took him off without an opportunity to utter one word of prayer. Have you not noticed that the dissipations of social life are blasting and destroying a vast multitude? With many life is a masquerade ball, and as at such entertainments gentlemen and ladies put on the garb of kings and queens, or mountebanks or clowns, and at the close put off the disguise, so a great many pass their whole life in a mask, taking off the mask at death. While the masquerade ball of life goes on, they trip merrily over the floor, gemmed hand is stretched to gemmed hand, gleaming brow bends to gleaming brow. On with the dance! Flush and rustle and laughter of immeasurable merrymaking. But after a while the languor of death comes on the limbs and blurs the eyesight. Lights lower. Floor hollow with sepulchral echo. Music saddened into a wail. Lights lower. Now the maskers are only seen in the dim light. Now the fragrance of the flowers is like the sickening odor that comes from garlands that have lain long in the vaults of cemeteries. Lights lower. Mists gather in the room. Glasses shake as though quaked by sullen thunder. Sight caught in the curtain. Scarf drops from the shoulder of beauty a shroud. Lights lower. Over the slippery boards in dance of death glide jealousies, envies, revenges, lust, despair and death. Stench of lamp-wicks almost extinguished. Torn garlands will not half cover the ulcerated feet. Choking damps. Chilliness. Feet still. Hands closed. Voices hushed. Eyes shut. Lights out.

I tell all those who have floated far away from God through social dissipations, that it is time you turned. For I remember that there were two vessels on the sea, and in a storm. It was very, very dark, and the two vessels were going straight for each other, and the captains knew it not. But after a while the man on the lookout saw the approaching ship, and he shouted, ’93Hard a-larboard!’94 and they turned just enough to glance by and passed in safety to their harbors. Some of you are in the storm of temptation and you are driving on and coming toward fearful collisions unless you change your course. Hard a-larboard! Turn ye, turn ye, for ’93why will ye die, oh, house of Israel?’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage