When We Work, but He Loves Us When We Dance. I'll bluff the rest. The Marquis de Chastellus has complained that we Americans have taken the dance and made it into a ritual of politics and marriage. By custom now, Americans are supposed to stay with the same partner all evening. Therefore, it is wholly to be abandoned of all good Christians.
Dancing serves no necessary use, no profitable, laudable, or pious end at all.
It is only from the inbred pravity, vanity, wantonness, incontinency, pride, profaneness, or madness of man's depraved nature. Therefore, it must needs be unlawful unto Christians. The way to heaven is too steep, too narrow for men to dance in and keep revel rout. The gate of heaven is too narrow for whole rounds, whole troops of dancers to march in together. We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip, may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.