“Cleanliness is next to godliness”

Origin

The phrase as we know it appears in John Wesley’s sermon “On Dress,” published posthumously in The Works of the Reverend John Wesley (1791). Wesley writes:

Slovenliness is no part of religion; 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.”

Wesley placed the proverb in quotation marks and added that he had encountered the form of the saying in ancient Hebrew tradition. No biblical text — in any translation — contains it.

An earlier related idea appears in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605):

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God, to society, and to ourselves.

Why the misattribution persists

Wesley’s phrasing was widely repeated in 18th- and 19th-century English-language sermons and conduct books. Because the saying was used so frequently in religious contexts and by religious figures, many readers assumed it had a biblical origin.

The Levitical law contains extensive ritual purity regulations (see Leviticus 11–15), which has reinforced the assumption that the proverb must be biblical, even though the wording is not.