More About Dancing

New Zealand Tablet, 26 July 1906, Page 9

More About Dancing

The 'vsatimeA dandies of the Georgian days amused themselves by ' pinking ' each" other with the protruding points of their dress swords. In an analogous way, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table * pinked ' with-

pointed raillery the conceited ignoramus whose store of knowledge was limited to a small cyclopaedia of the time, t-lien published ' as far as the ..letter C. "Beyond that barrier the world of science was to the knowra^. of the breakfast table a blank. 'An anonymous writer in the Napier ' Daily Telegraph ' has ' gone one better '—he has penetrated into the cyclopaedic region as far as the letter D. His scanty store of tabloid knowledge is spread before the Hawke's Bay public in the interests of another masked l-now-all (now, controversially, dead-meat) who recently declared that, mi the eyes of the ' Roman Catholic Church,' all manner of dancing is ' proximate^ occasion to mortal sin.' The un«derstudy of the man ' once behind the scenes ' professes to quote from St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom. But this is all a false pretence. He neither quotes from the one nor from the other. He probably never even saw a page of the writings of either. He merely set down the few lines from the article on *' Dancing ' in so poor an authority , on history and Catholic theology as ' Chambers' Encyclopaedia." We place the extracts side by side :—: — 1 Daily Telegraph.' ' ( hambers' Euryclopaedia. 1 St. Augustine condemned dano- ' St. Augustine says : "It is ing, teaching that "it is better better to dig than to dance" ; to dig: than to dance " ; and St. and. . St. Chrysostom says Chrysostom taught that origin- dancing came first from the ally dancing came from the devil.' '< devil.' We have only to remark : (1) No references and ! no context are given. (2) The sort 1 of dancing that the Fathers of the Church inveiphed against is well described as having come from the devil ; but it is happily unknown to decent society in our day. (3) The very same article in ' Chambers ' refers to the ' choral dances of the early C hristians,' and shows how, on various occasions, the Church declined to condemn national and other dances (not of the modern ball-room type) that were carried on with due der~ J corum. ' Religion docs not censure or exclude Unnumbered pleasures, harmlessly .pursued.' And in Catholic, as in Jewish, days, the solemn movements of the danee — the poetry of motion as well as the poetry of words and sounds — have been time and again employed in the service of •Him Who gave us all good things, and in Whom we are told by the Apostle to rejoice and evermore rejoice.