Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
Cleanliness is next to godliness
Not coined by Wesley. He put it in quotation marks himself, as something already proverbial.
Wesley's line, from Sermon 88, "On Dress" (1786), comes mid-sentence: "slovenliness is no part of religion; that neither this, nor any text of Scripture, condemns neatness of apparel. Certainly this is a duty, not a sin. 'Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness.'" The quotation marks in Wesley's own text suggest he was already citing something proverbial, not minting the phrase from nothing. Francis Bacon had voiced a related sentiment more than a century earlier in The Advancement of Learning, tying bodily cleanliness to "a due reverence to God."
Either way, the phrase never occurs in the biblical text itself, in any translation, in any language. It became a favorite of Victorian Christian moralists precisely because it sounds so plausibly scriptural: plain, proverbial, and moralizing in exactly the cadence a King James reader would expect from the real thing.
