From the Ball-Room to Hell

by Thomas A. Faulkner

But the man who can constantly see pure and lovely women being whirled to a disgrace from which she can never recover must have a heart hard indeed. Yet this is what I have witnessed and helped to perpetuate by teaching dancing. Still I heedlessly continued in the business, until something occurred which set me to thinking.

I met on a train, while leaving town, one day a young woman, who, a few months before, had been a member of my select dancing academy. She had been ruined there, and was one of the discarded ones when the school was closed for a few weeks, as all dancing-schools have to be every little while, to get rid of those girls who have met with a fate similar to hers.

I entered into conversation with her and found she could no longer endure being shunned and slighted by all her old companions, and was running away from home. I knew that her parents would be heart broken, and that she, without the protection of a home, would soon sink to utter abandonment, and I tried every persuasion to induce her to return to the home she was leaving. I—who was still teaching the very thing which had been her ruin, now that self-respect and all for which life was worth the living, was lost to her forever—I tried to save her from further degradation.

After I had argued for some time with her she turned fiercely upon me, her once beautiful eyes now filled with a desperation born of despair, and said, with a look and tone of reproach which I shall never forget: "Mr. Faulkner, when you will close your dancing schools and stop this business, which is sending so many girls by swift stages on a straight road to hell, then, sir, and not till then, will I think of reform."

I was stirred by her words as I had never been stirred before. But for them I might, perhaps, not have been writing this book to-day. At this I know many may sneer and say that I have myself done more than most men towards the furtherance of the evil I so strongly condemn.

I bow my acknowledgements. I own it all.

"I lived for self, I thought for self,
For self and none beside,
Just as if Christ had never lived.
As though he had never died."

I sinned against heaven and in the sight of God and man, and was in no wise worthy to become a child of him to whom I came ten months ago, and he received me just as I was, all stained with many, many sins, and in his boundless love and mercy he forgave them all.

I feel I cannot close this book without just a word to any of my old companions who may chance to read it, and to others who are leading the life I once led. I want you to forsake that old life I once shared with you and, as I have done, give yourselves into the hands of the Master, Jesus Christ.

You don't know what you are missing of happiness in this world and what you may miss in the world to come. I do not ask you to take my life for an example. That would be a poor example, indeed. We do not have to take any human life for a copy. The life of Christ is the one true example for us all, and I believe that when we stand before, the great Judge of all, the question will not be, if we have lived as well as this professing Christian or that church member, but if we have lived our life as nearly like the life of Christ as we could.