Let them go and fall away, O Zarathustra, and do not lament! Better even to blow amongst them with rustling winds,—
—Blow amongst those leaves, O Zarathustra, that everything WITHERED may run away from thee the faster!—
2.
“We have again become pious”—so do those apostates confess; and some of them are still too pusillanimous thus to confess.
Unto them I look into the eye,—before them I say it unto their face and unto the blush on their cheeks: Ye are those who again PRAY!
It is however a shame to pray! Not for all, but for thee, and me, and whoever hath his conscience in his head. For THEE it is a shame to pray!
Thou knowest it well: the faint-hearted devil in thee, which would fain fold its arms, and place its hands in its bosom, and take it easier:—this faint-hearted devil persuadeth thee that “there IS a God!”
THEREBY, however, dost thou belong to the light-dreading type, to whom light never permitteth repose: now must thou daily thrust thy head deeper into obscurity and vapour!
And verily, thou choosest the hour well: for just now do the nocturnal birds again fly abroad. The hour hath 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 hath come—their hour for hunt and procession, not indeed for a wild hunt, but for a tame, lame, snuffling, soft-treaders’, soft-prayers’ hunt,—