The Incompatibility of Theater-Going and Dancing with Membership in the Christian Church.

This thirty-two-page religious tract, published in 1872, condemns both theater and dance as being un-Christian endeavors. The text, attributed to the Reverend C. W. Andrews, then president of the Episcopal church's Convocation of the Valley of Virginia, was intended for dissemination to Episcopalian congregations throughout Virginia. The tract begins, "We start with the proposition that the Theater has been through its whole history, and is now, a school of vice." As for dancing, the author argues its destructiveness on both moral and physical grounds:

… the dangers to health from exposure, the passing from heated rooms, with a flushed and heated person, into the cold and dampness of night, and the consequent exchange of the ball room for the death chamber, the interruption of useful studies and of the order of families, the incitements to personal vanity and display, the restless and dissipated habits so often engendered by this amusement, all of which is sound and conclusive.