Related drafts for the first, second, and third scenes

5. CITIZEN: And unfortunately, one must recognize more and more every day how quickly this light is spreading. Where once, in warm feeling, the heart approached the spirit in piety and the soul, sensing eternity, bowed down, now cool calculation of a mad striving for perfection strangles the heart and mind. The simple joy of sensory revelation, in which people once absorbed God's life within themselves, is now shunned as the great deception. And when life appears dark, many today cast off the burden, thinking that repetition must bring something else. I have had to witness all this again and again with a shudder wherever I found the new teaching.