CHAPTER IX.

Amusements.

It is the anniversary of Herod's 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 is indulged. Toasts are drank. 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 "poetry of motion." Their souls whirl in the reel. and bound with the bounding feet. Herod forgets crown and throne and everything but the fascinations of Salome. All the magnificence of his realm is as 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 taking 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 begin to abate, the enchanted monarch swears to

the princely performer: "Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me I will give it thee, to the half of my kingdom." 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, " Bring me the head of John the Baptist on a dinner plate." 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 this platter? A new glass of wine to continue the uproarious merriment? No. Something redder and costlier-the 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 waitingmaid 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's 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.

DANCING UNIVERSALLY POPULAR.

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 Lacedæmonians. 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.

DANCING IN ANCIENT TIMES.

The exercise was so utterly and completely depraved in ancient times that the church anathematized it. The old Christian fathers expressed themselves most vehemently against it. St. Chrysostom says: "The feet were not given for dancing but to walk modestly, not to leap impudently like camels.' One of the dogmas of the ancient church reads: "A dance is the devil's 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." Elsewhere the old dogmas declared this: "The woman that singeth in the dance is the princess of the devil, and those that answer are her 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 hogsherd 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." 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.

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: "You give me the mastership of the army and I will destroy their 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." Ah! my friends, I have seen it again and again-the 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.

How many people in America have stepped from the ball-room 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 sepulchre floats up through the perfume, and the froth of Death's lip bubbles up in the champagne.

A BRILLIANT VICTIM.

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 the 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: "Have you any hope?" and then for the first her lips moved in a whisper as she said: "No hope!" Then she died. The world, she served it, and the world helped her not in the last.

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 merry-making. 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. Sigh caught in the curtain. Scarf drops from the shoulder of beauty a shroud. Lights lower. Over the slippery boards in dance of death glide jeal