MayMetMo 2020 #29: Soap for Sanctity

The city infested by the plague.

the peasants turned to their priests

with no knowledge of epidemiology, turned to prayer, and packed pews to turn the pestilence aside. Of course, this proved to spread the ailment further than before.    As the problem grew worse, they declared the problem with the sick to be “gods work” and resolved to allow the disease to spread among the masses.   The city itself was quarantined and the refuges and elders seemed to suffer the worst effects.

One such foreign-born dubbed the Lyer,   saw the suffering and the way some had recovered while others had not, and went into his storehouse, his containers of his wares,  and noticed a similarity between those affected and how his own kin had been thus far, immune to the pathology.

Testing his theory, he brought his wares to the river and combined with the water to make a frothy mixture that removed oils and dirt and he theorized, the disease itself from the skin of those that used it.

Bringing his invention to the priests, who balked at his claims, and asked what it could do to the masses to use this mixture that depended on them being wet, to use.

the Lyer shrugged and said to them that doubted,  “Cleanliness, is next to Godliness.”