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 is a concrete institution, to be judged as
a totality. It is responsible for what it tolerates and shelters. We,
therefore, hold it responsible for whatever of sensual impurity and
whatever of irreligion, as well as for whatever of occasional and
sporadic benefit there may be bound up in its organic life. Instead
of helping Christ's kingdom, it hinders; instead of saving souls, it
corrupts and destroys." Dr. Buckley gives this testimony: "Being aware
of the fact that the drama, like every thing else which caters to the
taste, has its fashions--rising and falling and undergoing various
changes--now improving, and then degenerating, I have thought it
desirable to institute a careful inquiry into the plays which have been
performed in the principal theaters of New York during the past three
years. Accordingly, I