"You do not then belong to any Heidelberg communion?"
"You do not possess the truth," replied the old man. "You baptize children who do not know the difference between good and evil, or what yes or no is, and then you say, they have renounced the Devil. Thus you begin with a lie."
"Well but for this reason children are confirmed at a riper age."
"A pretty ripeness. Go to the Sunday-school, when the boys sing out in lusty tones, as if welcoming summer, 'For whether we live, we live unto the Lord, or whether we die, we die unto the Lord,' or cheerily shriek out, 'O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?' You should be ashamed to teach children to babble the Holiest name like heathens, and to turn the whole affair to ridicule. Language used by children without thought is the beginning of lies. Dogs learn to chew leather when fastened to smeared thongs. You confirm them, when they are twelve or thirteen years old, not because the spirit moves them, but because it is time and customary. That is not an introduction to the church, but to the dancing saloon. The Parson preaches, not because he is urged on by the Spirit, but because he is paid for doing so. Like a quack he says on Sunday, what he has just learnt the day before. As I go home Sunday nights and see the lights in the study of the rectory when the two parsons and the two deacons are preparing their sermons, I cannot help thinking: they are not ashamed of lying. Verily they no longer know it to be a lie, when they stretch out their arms and call upon the Lord in heaven in a state of ecstasy, and repeat all the time what they prepared the day before, and lower down sits the Parson's wife, who has heard him reading it aloud, and she does not feel ashamed either. And others there are who preach in the Chapel of the Stift, and call so earnestly on the Lord, that the hearts of the poor nuns sink quite low under their tight bodices, and then they go over to Heidelberg to the Holy Ghost, and call on Him again in exactly the same words, so that he may the better remember them, because the Almighty is rather forgetful. Is it not so?"
"Well, but man," replied Felix indignantly, "how would you have a church without a priest, or how could you have service on Sundays, if the preacher did not prepare his sermon?"
"Come to us, and I will show you."
"Who are you," said Felix.
"When you come to Ziegelhausen, ask for Werner the miller of the Kreuzgrund, and you will be shown the way. You are a Romanist?"
"I am."
"And your brother is still one at heart?"