William Ashley Sunday (ever heard of Billy Sunday?) was a traveling evangelist during the early 20th century, so the pamphlet is probably something my grandparents, devout Baptists, picked up at a big tent church revival. If you read the link, the man also had a lot to do with Prohibition.
Some of Billy Sunday's wisdom:
Girls, you flirted with some Tom-Dick-Harry on the street; today your virtue is dragged up and down the highways. God pity you! But for the sake of my life I can't get some people to head my warnings.
I walk up to a young man and I say: Be careful, my boy, don't keep company with that Godless, sneering, beer-drinking gang; don't listen to the vile, lewd stories they pour into your ears . . . Don't comment on the symmetry of some girl's form. I smell liquor on your breath.
Don't go to that dance, the most damnable, hellish, low-down institution on the face of the earth, that causes the ruination of more girls than anything this side of the pit of Hell.
My grandparents didn't drink, didn't play cards, and didn't dance. And this explains why my dad was what my aunt termed hell on wheels in high school.
This moral leper fell a long way from the family tree.
4 comments:
Wasn't one of the Hawaiian islands reserved for lepers? The one for moral lepers must have been even more fun! And shouldn't it more properly be called Moral Hansen's Disease?
Molokai. We've never visited that island because we found Kauai. The moral leper preserve is in Las Vegas.
So dancing is what dies it! ;-) LOL
Linda
Evidently so! And card games can also be very risky. (It must happen under the table?)
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