In that letter of 30 October bishop Grandisson ordered solemn public processions in his diocese every Wednesday and Friday up to Christmas. He was living at Chudleigh Manor all the time, about six miles from here; so I imagine that there were processions all around. He also ordered masses, psalms and prayers. These were then the proper weapons for combatting the Plague: nobody smelled Rats. So also at Rhodes in October 1498 the Grand Master of the Knights ordered fasting and prayer, and the people all sang Alleluia. Columbus had brought a new disease from the New World, and it had just reached Rhodes; but these good people had not yet found out how it was propagated. The local poet, Emmanuel Georgillas, wrote a poem on it in medieval Greek, _Thanaticon tês Rhodou_. He says that the disease claimed victims from amongst them all, old men and matrons, boys and unwedded girls, the Knights themselves, and even the Archbishop. At last John Baptist triumphed over Charon--that is what the poet says--but the Grand Master of the Knights had not relied exclusively upon their patron saint: he had locked the ladies up. Providence helps those who help themselves, and leaves whole generations to their fate unless they take the trouble to find out how diseases come and how they can be kept away. Plague is carried by rats’ fleas, just as typhus is carried by lice and malaria by mosquitos; the rats themselves are victims. Trichinosis is caused by pigs, and leprosy by fish; but the rats invade us of their own free will, and it is no fault of the pigs or fish that people sometimes eat them ‘cured,’ not cooked. When the chieftains of the Delta of the Nile went to King Pianchi to tender their submission to him, about 750 B.C., he would not let them come inside the palace, as they were people who ate fish--see lines 149 to 151 of his inscription--and Jews were just as hard on people who ate pigs. Had the Jews abstained from eating fish, they might have been immune from leprosy, which is a worse disease than any they could have caught by eating pigs; and with proper cooking they might have eaten both. All those ancient prohibitions were too wide, like this modern prohibition of strong drink on the mere chance that it may make men drunk. I doubt the Totem theory of abstinence from certain foods, and fancy somebody had noticed that certain diseases went with certain kinds of food, and had prohibited those foods accordingly. There have been men whose precepts we all follow without quite understanding why, and we say these men were “in advance of their generation” or “born before their time”; and yet the truth may be the other way--they were of their generation and their time, but mankind has deteriorated since.