To them I look into the eye,- before them I say it to their face and to the blush on their cheeks: You are those who again pray!
It is shameful to pray! Not for all, but for you, and me, and whoever has his conscience in his head. For you it is shameful to pray!
You know it well: the faint-hearted devil in you, which would rather fold its arms, and place its hands in its bosom, and take it easier:- this faint-hearted devil persuades you that "there is a God!"
Thereby, however, do you belong to the light-dreading type, to whom light never permits repose: now must you daily thrust your head deeper into obscurity and vapor!
And verily, you choose the hour well: for just now do the nocturnal birds again fly abroad. The hour has come for all light-dreading people, the vesper hour and leisure hour, when they do not- "take leisure."
I hear it and smell it: it has come- their hour for hunt and procession, not indeed for a wild hunt, but for a tame, lame, snuffling, soft-treaders', soft-prayers' hunt,-
-For a hunt after susceptible simpletons: all mouse-traps for the heart have again been set! And whenever I lift a curtain, a night-moth rushes out of it.
Did it perhaps squat there along with another night-moth? For everywhere do I smell small concealed communities; and wherever there are closets there are new devotees therein, and the atmosphere of devotees.
They sit for long evenings beside one another, and say: "Let us again become like little children and say, 'good God!'"- ruined in mouths and stomachs by the pious confectioners.
Or they look for long evenings at a crafty, lurking cross-
