The sick man at first listened quietly, afterwards his lips followed the sound in motion and finally spoke aloud and with a prayerful tone.
When they had finished, the colporteur said: "It is good to pray, I believe!"
"It is like medicine. The words, the old words, awake memories and give powers, the same powers as they formerly gave to the powerless, who sought God outside himself. Do you know what God is? It is Archimedes wishing for a fixed point outside, by the support of which he could lift the earth. It is the imagined magnet in the earth, without which the movement of the needle would be unexplainable. It is that ether, which must be invented so that the vacant space can be filled. It is the molecule, without which the laws of chemistry would be miracles. Give me a little more hypotheses before anything else the fixed point outside myself, for I am entirely loose."
"Do you wish me to speak of Jesus?" asked the preacher, who believed that the sick man was irrational.
"No, not of Jesus! It is either a tale or a Hypothesis. It is a device of revengeful slaves and evil women; it is the God of the mollusks opposed to the vertebrates ... but wait, am I not myself a mollusk. Speak of Jesus! Tell of how he accompanied custom house men and dissolute women, as I have been obliged to do. Speak of how the spiritually poor shall own heaven, because they had no power on earth; and how he taught artisans to waste the time and, beggars, sluggards, prodigal sons, who owned nothing, to share with the industrious, who owned something."
"No. You blasphemer, I am not sitting here as a fool for you!" interrupted the preacher and arose in earnest.
"Do not go, do not go!" cried the sick man. "Hold my hand and let me hear your voice. Speak what you please! Read! Read in the almanac or the Bible, it is immaterial to me. Horror vacui, fear of the empty nothing must away!"
"See thou, that thou hast a fear of death?"
"Surely I have that just as every living thing, which without the fear of death never would have lived, but the doom, you see, I do not fear, for the work judges the master, and I have not created myself."
The colporteur had gone!