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LECTURE II.

DANGERS OF YOUNG MEN.

He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.-Prov. xiii, 20.

In addressing you a second time, my young friends, on the dangers that beset your pathway, I would not be misunderstood; I would not have you imagine that I am using the language of censure. I come to you as a friend. My remarks are intended to be cautionary; my design is prevention; and I speak with all the freedom a pastor is accustomed to use in the Bible-class room, or a father in the midst of his own household. If I see danger lurking, where you little suspect it-where popular opinion, and even many respectable persons see only innocent amusement-I shall freely point it out, and give you reasons, which I hope will have some weight with you. Resuming, then, the subject of popular amusements, I shall find myself compelled to condemn what many defend, and even eulogize. Little as some of you have been accustomed to look for danger, in that promiscuous mingling of the sexes, in balls, cotillion parties, and dances of various names, reflection and observation convince me, that the results of such amusements are never useful, and rarely fail to prove pernicious. The advo cates of this class of amusements usually begin by

telling us dancing is highly conducive to health, and almost indispensable to those who lead a sedentary life. I reply, that whatever it might be, we are to judge of it as it is, as it has been, and it is likely it always will be. Now whatever it might be, we may safely affirm that, as it is, it kills or injures two, where it cures or benefits one. Its advocates are very cautious not to tell us of the late hours, the heated rooms, the thin dresses, the excessive fatigue, the excitement preceding and the languor succeeding, the coughs and pulmonary complaints, superinduced by passing out of heated rooms into the damp or frosty atmosphere of a winter's night. We hear from them nothing of the incredible number of deaths following a winter of fashionable dissipation.

It is alleged that dancing is almost or quite essential, to impart ease or grace to the carriage, to give elasticity to the step, and teach what some are pleased to term "the poetry of motion." Now the idea that dancing should be essential to the formation of a genteel carriage, appears to me very much like positive nonsense. As though a young person could not learn to enter or leave a room, to walk gracefully across the floor, or to make a polite bow, without first passing under the hands of that most contemptible of all bipeds, the dancing-master. Have the boys no fathers, or the girls no mothers— have they no powers of observation or imitationand is a dancing-master the only person capable of teaching politeness?

True gentility is not a thing to be played off

in measured steps, and whispered out in affected tones. It is the out-speaking of a benevolent heart, and the out-beaming of a gentle soul through a mild eye. The true way to refine the manners is to refine the feelings. How refining to gentlemanly feeling or maidenly delicacy must be the lascivious whirlings of the waltz! No, my young friends; you must not mistake a mincing step, or a simpering smile, or a fine bow, for refinement. "It is not in the dancing-master's evolutions, or the sounds of fiddle-strings, that you can find it. Wealth cannot buy it; it dwells not in jewelry and buckram. Power and place cannot bestow it. Lord Jeffreys, though seated on the highest tribunal in the realm, was a very vulgar man, and could pour forth torrents of brutal ribaldry; and a vulgar man was Chancellor Thurlow, sporting oaths and obscenity at the table of the Prince of Wales. But there was no vulgarity about James Ferguson, though herding sheep; while his eye watched Arcturus and the Pleiades, and his wistful spirit wandered through immensity. Though seated at a stocking-loom, there was no want of refinement in the youth who penned the "Star of Bethlehem,"-the weaver-boy, Henry Kirke White, was not a vulgar lad." The school of fine feeling is the school of good manGentleness is the parent of gentility. One hour in a refined and virtuous social circle, is worth more than all the dancing parties of a whole season.

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But, again look at the effects upon the purse. Can you even conjecture how many fathers, every

winter, toil, day after day, behind the counter, or in the sales-room, or at the mechanic's bench-pale, careworn, exhausted in spirits—to support an idle son or extravagant daughter through a season of fashionable folly or dissipation? Or how many are the young men, who spend the wages of the summer in dancing through the winter? They toil hard to feed the dancing-master, the tavern-keeper, and the fiddler. And suppose the case to be otherwise suppose these young people are the sons and daughters of the wealthy, and can draw from an overflowing purse; would they not derive infinitely more pleasure, in allowing the amounts thus expended to go to the cause of benevolence, to the children of poverty and sickness, to the orphan or the widow? Would to God our fashionable young people and every class of our young peoplewould be induced to go and see what some others see, and hear the tales of woe they hear, and enjoy the luxury of expending the fives, the tens, and the fifties, in god-like charity, which are now expended in folly and in dissipation. General Lafayette, once, during the revolutionary war, attended gay party at Richmond, Virginia. Shrewdly complimenting the ladies and the party, he said—"But my soldiers want clothing." So we say to young men-the poor want bread, and the world wants Bibles!

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Once more: consider the effect upon mental improvement.

What proficiency, do you think, will be made in

study, in the culture of the intellect, or in acquiring a profession, during a winter devoted to the dancing-school, or the ball-room? I need not stop to answer this question; to ask it is quite sufficient. And, again: How far is it from the ball-room to the bar-room? and what proportion of the young men who find their way to the one, keep entirely aloof from the other?

And yet again: consider the exhibitions often witnessed in these nocturnal assemblies. Are the dancing and waltzing all modest? are they always decent? Would a young lady, introduced for the first time, or a discreet mother, see nothing in those lascivious whirlings to crimson the cheek of modesty? Can a young gentleman of sense and modesty see a sister engaged in the waltz, with, perhaps, he scarcely knows whom, without misgivings of heart? And are there no dashing rakes, who find their way even into the most select of those assemblies? and are there no parents who have occasion to regret the acquaintances and connexions formed there?

Finally consider the effect produced upon the heart.

Candidly, my young friends, Is the ball-room the place to cultivate the moral feelings? Would any awakened sinner go there to exercise penitence? Can any sane person ask God's blessing on the dance? Would any one wish to receive his summons from the dancing saloon to the judgment seat of Christ?

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