better; but unfortunately our religion is weak
on the sanitary side. One of the worst misfortunes of Christendom was
that reaction against the voluptuous bathing of the imperial Romans
which made dirty habits a part of Christian piety, and in some unlucky
places (the Sandwich Islands for example) made the introduction of
Christianity also the introduction of disease, because the formulators
of the superseded native religion, like Mahomet, had been enlightened
enough to introduce as religious duties such sanitary measures as
ablution and the most careful and reverent treatment of everything
cast off by the human body, even to nail clippings and hairs; and our
missionaries thoughtlessly discredited this godly doctrine without
supplying its place, which was promptly taken by laziness and neglect.
If the priests of Ireland could only be persuaded to teach their flocks
that it is a deadly insult to the Blessed Virgin to place her image in a
cottage that is not kept up to that high standard of Sunday cleanliness
to which all her worshippers must believe she is accustomed, and to
represent her as being especially particular about stables because
her son was born in one, they might do more in one year than all the
Sanitary Inspectors in Ireland could do in twenty; and they could hardly
doubt that Our Lady would be delighted. Perhaps they do nowadays; for
Ireland is certainly a transfigured country since my youth as far as
clean faces and pinafores can transfigure it. In England, where so
many of the inhabitants are too gross to believe in poetic faiths, too
respectable to tolerate the notion that the stable at Bethany was a
common peasant farmer's stable instead of a first-rate racing one, and
too savage to believe that anything can really cast out the devil of
disease unless it be some terrifying hoodoo of tortures and stinks, the
M.O.H. will no doubt for a long time to come have to preach to fools
according to their folly, promising miracles, and threatening hideous
personal consequences of neglect of by-laws and the like; therefore it
will be important that every M.O.H. shall have, with his (or her) other
qualifications, a sense of humor, lest (he or she) should come at last
to believe all the nonsense that must needs be talked. But he must, in
his capacity of an expert advising the authorities, keep the government
itself free of superstition. If Italian peasants are so ignorant that
the Church can get no hold of them except b