THE GOSPEL OF CLEANLINESS.
By Dr. C. W. Lyman
SCIENCE continues to pile up evidence of the need of a more universal adoption of what is known as Dutch cleanliness. The recent advances in our knowledge of the noxious microorganisms that swarm in all dirty things and places, have thrown a singular illumination upon the obligatory washings which the more enlightened races of olden times made incumbent on the people. An unusual and scientific dignity now invests the religious codes of various ancient nations—Jews, Mohammedans, and Brahmans—in view of the solemnly enacted requirements they contained as to bathing, purification, and the cleanliness or uncleanness of garments and food. Greeks, Romans, Dutch, and New Englanders arrived at the same conclusions, not religiously, but from the dictates of a supreme common sense. Now the nineteenth century takes the same platform, represented by trained men from the little world of the microscope and from the biological laboratories. It would be well for the present era if all agencies for instilling the gospel of cleanliness were kept going simultaneously, and if dirtiness were denounced from pulpits as a sin, punished as a social disgrace, and treated by educators as an outrage to modern intelligence.—The Voice.