Cleanliness and Godliness.
PROF. LYON PLAYFAIR recently delivered a long address on sanitary reform before the Social Science Congress at Glasgow. In the course of his remarks, he said: “It is not a pleasing task to dwell on the habits of the population even in our country, in past times. Go back only to the time previous to the Reformation, and you can have no difficulty in understanding why luxury and squalor produced the plagues of the times of the Tudors and the Stuarts. High above all other dwellings were the castles and the monasteries, but the cabin of the peasant was worse than any now found in the furtherest isles of Scotland. It was made of reeds and sticks plastered over with mud. In these wigwams, lived an ague-stricken population. In the towns, the mechanics lived in rooms without glass windows, slept on straw beds, and worked in workshops unheated by coal fires. Even in well-to-do houses, rushes covered the earthen floors, and got saturated with scraps of food, which remained to putrefy under a new layer of rushes scattered over it, so that the ‘petremen’ came to dig saltpeter out of the floors. Filth, instead of being abhorred, was almost sanctified. The monks imitated the filthy habits of the hermits and saints of early Christian times; for the early fathers commended them. Even St. Jerome used to praise the filthy habits of hermits. He especially commends an Egyptian hermit who only combed his hair on Easter Sunday, and never washed his clothes at all, but let them fall to pieces by rottenness. St. Anthony never washed his feet. St. Thomas à Becket, when martyred, had under garments in a state which makes one shudder at the remembrance. And so the monks, up to the time of the Reformation, and indeed in part up to the present day, thought or professed to think, that by antithesis, pollution of the body indicated cleanliness of the soul. Practically, indeed, it helped to it; because the odor of sanctity which infested these old monks and hermits helped to keep them apart from the temptations of the world; for the world scarcely cared to come into too close contact with those odoriferous saints. But this association of filth with religion was unhappy in its consequences; for men ceased to connect disease with uncleanliness, and resorted to shrines and winking virgins for cure of maladies which were produced by their own physical and moral impurities. Under all these influences, plagues were very destructive in England.”