Cleanliness is next to godliness

Wesley's actual line, from Sermon 88, "On Dress" (1791), reads in full: "Slovenliness is no part of religion… '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.