Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/92

 force of association har fastened a tarnished name to it; and so long as it is condemned to be the prerogative of the Circes and the Syrens of our society (and it must be so till we decline to be charmed by the murky music of a maudlin), it must be content to be the bond-maid of iniquity, the stalking-horse for impurity to prey all the more securely. Lastly, sullying, degrading, debasing must be the effect upon all—home and neighbourhood, wife and children, guests and friends—of an entertainment in which, pretending to no secrecy and mindful of no modesty, she who,, of all womankind, is the only one to take a hire for her 'person', she who has forfeited the sweet name of sister, she who is nor maid nor wife nor widow, she whose "heart is snares and nets" and whose "house is the way to hell," simulates a virtue she daily desecrates, or pleads for a pleasure she daily pollutes. To touch pitch and not be tarred, is to dream of repealing an eternal ethical law. The weighty words of the learned and venerable Dr.