If any doubt is felt as to the really essential character of the connection between cleanliness and the sexual impulse it may be dispelled by the consideration that the association is by no means confined to Christian Europe.  If we go outside Europe and even Christendom altogether, to the other side of the world, we find it still well marked.  The wantonness of the luxurious people of Tahiti when first discovered by European voyagers is notorious.  The Areoi of Tahiti, a society largely constituted on a basis of debauchery, is a unique institution so far as primitive peoples are concerned.  Cook, after giving one of the earliest descriptions of this society and its objects at Tahiti (Hawkesworth, An Account of Voyages, etc., 1775, vol. ii, p. 55), immediately goes on to describe the extreme and scrupulous cleanliness of the people of Tahiti in every respect; they not only bathed their bodies and clothes every day, but in all respects they carried cleanliness to a higher point than even “the politest assembly in Europe.”  Another traveler bears similar testimony:  “The inhabitants of the Society Isles are, among all the nations of the South Seas, the most cleanly; and the better sort of them carry cleanliness to a very great length”; they bathe morning and evening in the sea, he remarks, and afterward in fresh water to remove the particles of salt, wash their hands before and after meals, etc. (J.R.  Forster, “Observations made during a Voyage round the World,” 1798, p. 398.) And William Ellis, in his detailed description of the people of Tahiti (Polynesian Researches, 1832, vol. i, especially Chapters VI and IX), while emphasizing their extreme cleanliness, every person of every class bathing at least once or twice a day, dwells on what he considers their unspeakable moral debasement; “notwithstanding the apparent mildness of their disposition and the cheerful vivacity of their conversation, no portion of the human race was ever perhaps sunk lower in brutal licentiousness and moral degradation.”

    After leaving Tahiti Cook went on to New Zealand.  Here he found
    that the people were more virtuous than at Tahiti, and also, he
    found, less clean.

It is, however, a mistake to suppose that physical uncleanliness ruled supreme through mediaeval and later times.  It is true that the eighteenth century, which saw the birth of so much that marks our modern world, witnessed a revival of the old ideal of bodily purity.  But the struggle between two opposing ideals had been carried on for a thousand years or more before this.  The Church, indeed, was in this matter founded on an impregnable rock.  But there never has been a time when influences outside the Church have not found a shelter somewhere.  Those traditions of the classic world which Christianity threw aside as useless or worse quietly reappeared.  In no respect was this more notably the case than in regard to the love of pure water and the cult of the