further details may be found.)

In sixteenth-century Italy, a land of supreme elegance and
fashion, superior even to France, the conditions were the same,
and how little water found favor even with aristocratic ladies we
may gather from the contemporary books on the 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