“Cleanliness is indeed next to Godliness,” is an oft-quoted saying of John Wesley. Bacon stated the maxim thus: “Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.” The Hebrew Fathers, from whom this sanitary principle was derived, resolved the doctrines of religion into “Carefulness; Carefulness into Vigorousness; Vigorousness into Guiltlessness; Guiltlessness into Abstemiousness; Abstemiousness into Cleanliness; Cleanliness into Godliness.”

This religious creed was doubtless based on the Mosaic sanitary code, and was the preventive measure against pestilences which the Cleanliness Next
to Godliness great Jewish law-giver approved. How generally and how long the “Chosen People” adopted and practised this method of protection against epidemic diseases does not appear, but it is quite certain that in later days it had been discarded.

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The Hebrew Fathers could have had no conception of the invisible agencies in filth that made uncleanness such a powerful factor in the propogation of epidemic pestilences and domestic contagious and infectious diseases. It was reserved for the scientists Invisible Agencies
in Filth of the recent past to discover the exact nature of the infective germs of communicable diseases, their origin, their development, their modes of infection; in other words, their life history.
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