toilet, which abound with recipes against itch and similar diseases.  It should be added that Burckhardt (Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, eighth edition, volume ii, p. 92) considers that in spite of skin diseases the Italians of the Renaissance were the first nation in Europe for cleanliness.

It is unnecessary to consider the state of things in other European countries.  The aristocratic conditions of former days are the plebeian conditions of to-day.  So far as England is concerned, such documents as Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of Great Britain (1842) sufficiently illustrate the ideas and the practices as regards personal cleanliness which prevailed among the masses during the nineteenth century and which to a large extent still prevail.

A considerable amount of opprobrium has been cast upon the Catholic Church for its direct and indirect influence in promoting bodily uncleanliness.  Nietzsche sarcastically refers to the facts, and Mr. Frederick Harrison asserts that “the tone of the middle ages in the matter of dirt was a form of mental disease.”  It would be easy to quote many other authors to the same effect.

It is necessary to point out, however, that the writers who have committed themselves to such utterances have not only done an injustice to Christianity, but have shown a lack of historical insight.  Christianity was essentially and fundamentally a rebellion against the classic world, against its vices, and against their concomitant virtues, against both its practices and its ideals.  It sprang up in a different part of the Mediterranean basin, from a different level of culture; it found its supporters in a new and lower social stratum.  The cult of charity, simplicity, and faith, while not primarily ascetic, became inevitably allied with asceticism, because from its point of view:  sexuality was the very stronghold of the classic world.  In the second century the genius of Clement of Alexandria and of the great Christian thinkers who followed him seized on all those elements in classic life and philosophy which could be amalgamated with Christianity without, as they trusted, destroying its essence, but in the matter of sexuality there could be no compromise, and the condemnation of sexuality involved the condemnation of the bath.  It required very little insight and sagacity for the Christians to see—­though we are now apt to slur over the fact—­that the cult of the bath was in very truth the cult of the flesh.[22] However profound their ignorance of anatomy, physiology, and psychology might be, they had before them ample evidence to show that the skin is an outlying sexual zone and that every application which promoted the purity, brilliance, and healthfulness of the skin constituted a direct appeal, feeble or strong as the case might be, to those passions against which they were warring.  The moral was evident:  better let the temporary garment of your flesh be soaked with dirt than risk staining the radiant purity of your immortal soul.  If Christianity had not drawn that moral with clear insight and relentless logic Christianity would never have been a great force in the world.