Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/451

Rh salvation to the soul; hence that cleanliness betokens pride, and filthiness humility. Living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the Church and society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing; St. Mary, of Egypt, was eminent for filthiness; St. Simon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable—the only thing that can be said is, that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors. The Lives of the Saints dwell with complacency on the statement that when sundry Eastern monks showed a disposition to wash themselves, the Almighty manifested his displeasure by drying up a neighboring stream until the bath which it had supplied was destroyed.

The religious world was far indeed from the inspired utterance attributed to John Wesley, that "cleanliness is near akin to godliness." For century after century the idea prevailed that filthiness was akin to holiness, and while we may well believe that the devotion of the clergy to the sick was a main cause why, during the greater plagues, they lost so large a proportion of their numbers, we can not escape the conclusion that their want of cleanliness had much to do with it; in France, during the fourteenth century, Guy de Chauliac, the great physician of his time, noted particularly that certain Carmelite monks suffered especially from pestilence, and that they were especially filthy; during the black death no less than nine hundred Carthusian monks fell victims in one group of buildings.

Naturally, such an example set by the venerated leaders of thought exercised great influence throughout society, and all the more because it justified the carelessness and sloth to which ordinary humanity is prone. In the principal towns of Europe, as well as in the country at large, down to a recent period, the most ordinary sanitary precautions were neglected, and pestilences continued to be attributed to the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. As to the wrath of God, a new and powerful impulse was given to this belief in the Church toward the end of the sixth century by St. Gregory the Great. In 590, when he was elected Pope, the city of Rome was suffering from a dreadful pestilence: the people died by thousands; out of one procession imploring the mercy of Heaven, no less than eighty persons died within an hour; what the heathen in an earlier epoch had attributed to