WILES OF THE DEVIL.

Taranaki Daily News, 23 July 1921, Page 11

WILES OF THE DEVIL.

EVILS OF DANCING. SHORT DRESSES CONDEMNED. Bathurst (N.S.W.), July 2. In the course of an address on the “Wiles of the Devil,” Ambassador Booth, in Bathurst denounced dancing, women’s lack of dress, and smoking, which he said were having a demoralising effect on the nation’s manhood and womanhood.

With regard to ladies’ dresses, he warned the womenfolk to take care how they tempted men- and asked if tftej knew anything about the struggle men had to keep true and worthy. Demoralisation was a device of the devil more calculated to ruin young lives -than was dancing, and he spoke as an evangelist of 40 years’ experience, who had trained 10,000 other evangelists. He had established 100 institutions for the rescue of fallen girls, and had hunted down the fellows who had ruined them, and he found that 90 per cent, of such appalling cases were the direct results of the dancing room.

“Alas!” remarked the preacher, “the damage done is beyond the power ot man to conceive. Drink is nothing to the scourge of impurity, and yet it is true the Church has the tendency to lower the bars of conscience and countenance dancing. It permits the sexes to come together in such a way which would be condemned and considered indecent and highly improper in any other circumstances.”

The dance dresses, he said, were designed with a purpose, a forethought and intent to display as much of tne person as it was dared, to appeal to the attentions of men, and attract them as nothing would, to raise a sleeping chagrin in some young man’s breast. He knew a girl in New York City, who in anguish of conscience pulled her hair out because of what had happened after a certain ball. Many a bright, promising lad has learnt his first lesson of taking liberties with a girl in the danceroom. The smokers, too, were hard hit by Ambassador Booth. Nicotin-doped, to-bacco-drugged men and women—what a countless host they were! he said.