Is Cleanliness a Virtue?

South Canterbury Times, Issue 7424, 25 November 1893, Page 3

Is Cleanliness a Virtue?

Under the heading “ A Luxury that poses as a Virtue,” Harper's Weeldy makes the following very sensible remarks : You may think it is the Bible that soya that “ Cleanliness is next to godliness ” ; but no, it was merely John Wesley. Bartlett attributes it to him, and records that be said it in a sermon on dress* Personal cleanliness is all very well, and no doubt the congregations that John Wesley was in the habit of addressing stood in some need of having the merits of it expounded to them. But it can be run into the ground. If it is a virtue at all it is one that is easily exaggerated into a vicious excess. It is a luxury, and like all other luxuries it is more or lees enervating. People who have formed the habit of keeping clean and living in clean houses, are not happy unless their surroundings are neat and tidy ; they dislike work that soils their hands and messes their clothes, and consequently are much less ready to take hold and help when occasion offers than their lens fastidious fellows. Moreover, like other luxuries, cleanliness is costly. To live in a clean bouaa, especially if it is a large one, is a very serious expenses. To have windows washed once a week, and carpets swept and rugs shaken, paint washed now and then, and ceilings whitened once a year, and to have clean table linen and bright silver, are all luxuries that eat up the incomes of families, and divert expenditure from other fields. J t does not do a family any real good to be so desperately clean. Its hospitality is not more gracious, or its benevolence truer because of it. Indeed it often works directly against these attributes. Who has not known housekeepers to whom guests were not welcome because of the trouble of putting things to rights after they had gone? And who does not know families whose inoomea are so taxed by the care and cost of fine clothes, and a fine dwelling kept in perfect order, but they can seldom afford to have anyone in their bouses except themselves, and can seldom spare either time or money for spiritual or intellectual advancement? Cases have been known where mothers of families, who were harassed almost to sleeplessness by the disparity between income and expenses, have still put two clean dresses a day upon each of their children, not in conscious defiance of fiscal laws, but out of helpless inability to see anything but good in clean clothes. It is undeniably nice to be clean and to live in a clean house. But it is dear, and it may easily cost more than it is worth. Up to a certain point it is a great thing not to he afraid of dirt. Dirt is somewhat uncomfortable, unless you are used to it ; bub there are worse things It is not so bad as debt, or meanness, or that poverty of the soul which possesses nothing that it can share. The very rich may be es clean as they can, but the poor and people in moderate circumstances should only be as clean as they can afford to be. If it costs too much to wash the windows twice a mopth, wash

them once a quarter. If it is P reat a strain to keep tbe children clean all day, be satisfied with having them go clean to bed, femme very nice children get, their clothes dirty, and children may be spick and span and not nice at all. Grimy or stufiy dwellings are not pleasant, but it is by no raer ns in the most immaculate houses that the most comfort is found. Oftentimes there is more present satisfaction and more future benefit to be had with a book in a spare hour by a dingy window, than where the window glass is bright, but as a consequence there is no and no spare hour to read it in. It is generally conceded that if the man in the house has a fair chance he will make himself comfortable. Bis lair may not be exceptionally neat or particularly pretty, hut it will be a good place to sit in and a good place to work in. Does he ever complain that it is not kept clean enough ? No, never. When ho grumbles it is because the carpet has been taken up, or all the books turned out, and the ourtains carried off and tbe windows washed- Men are tolerably clean animals, but thev don’t make such a fetish of cleanliness as some women do who know no better. To be comfortably clean is good, but to be extravagantly and inconveniently clean is a greater mistake than to go dirty.