5.  First, it is a mark of politeness.  It is universally agreed upon, that no one, unadorned with this virtue, can go into company without giving a manifest offence.  The easier or higher any one’s fortune is, this duty rises proportionably.  The different nations of the world are as much distinguished by their cleanliness, as by their arts and sciences.  The more any country is civilized, the more they consult this part of politeness.  We need but compare our ideas of a female Hottentot with an English beauty, to be; satisfied with the truth of what hath been advanced.

6.  In the next place, cleanliness may be said to be the foster-mother of love.  Beauty, indeed, most commonly produces that passion in the mind, but cleanliness preserves it.  An indifferent face and person, kept in perpetual neatness, hath won many a heart from a pretty slattern.  Age itself is not unamiable, while it is preserved clean and unsullied:  like a piece of metal constantly kept smooth and bright, we look on it with more pleasure than on a new vessel that is cankered with rust.

7.  I might observe further, that as cleanliness renders us agreeable to others, so it makes it easy to ourselves; that it is an excellent preservative of health; and that several vices, destructive both to mind and body, are inconsistent with the habit of it.  But these reflections I shall leave to the leisure of my readers, and shall observe in the third place, that it bears a great analogy with purity of mind, and naturally inspires refined sentiments and passions.

8.  We find, from experience, that through the prevalence of custom, the most vicious actions lose their horror, by being made familiar to us.  On the contrary, those who live in the neighbourhood of good examples, fly from the first appearances of what is shocking.  It fares with us much after the same manner as our ideas.  Our senses, which are the inlets to all the images conveyed to the mind, can only transmit the impression of such things as usually surround them; so that pure and unsullied thoughts are naturally suggested to the mind, by those objects that perpetually encompass us, when they are beautiful and elegant in their kind.

9.  In the East, where the warmth of the climates makes cleanliness more immediately necessary than in colder countries, it is made one part of their religion; the Jewish law (and the Mahometan, which, in somethings, copies after it) is filled with bathings, purifications, and other rites of the like nature.  Though there is the above named convenient reason to be assigned for these ceremonies, the chief intention, undoubtedly, was to typify inward purity and cleanliness of heart by those outward washings.

10.  We read several injunctions of this kind in the book of Deuteronomy, which confirms this truth, and which are but ill accounted for by saying, as some do, that they were only instituted for convenience in the desert, which otherways could not have been habitable, for so many years.