But if all guilt be revenged upon earth, punishment of this misuse of pity may not be stayed. It is doubly punished and revenged—upon him who practices it and upon him upon whom it is practiced. Or do we not know that the pharisees of pity become ever more feeble and sentimental men, losing all power and energy of will through pure emotionality? Or do we not know that most crafty business speculation, speculation in pity, in which sufferers magnify their least pains, expert in making an impression with their “cases” in order to arouse the interest of the pitiful, an interest which need not always be relieved by the clink of coin, but which makes ready its punishment much more frequently with idle hours spent in dreaming and weeping, with the unprofitable breathing-out of pathos and reproach? Often enough the enthusiasts of the kind and tender heart do not know what they do, but they rob men of the marrow of life, they emasculate and coddle the soul; and the emotional debauchery in which they live, requires ever stronger stimulus which ever operates more enervatingly still. Contemplating these devastations wrought everywhere in life by love’s softness, one begins to cherish some respect for a Nietzsche who preached to men “a hard bed,” love’s hardness. To be sure, if one is to understand this preaching, one must keep in mind what the preacher says: “My brethren, give heed unto each hour, in which your spirit wisheth to speak in parables: there is the origin of your virtue.” Nietzsche speaks in parables. For instance, his words on war and warriors—a good war hallowing every cause—these, too, are parables. And hardness, bravery, praised by him as the strength and consecration of life, truly this is not the barbarity of prize-fighting or the brutality of lynching; this is the high mind fearlessly going its own way, stampeded by no danger into thinking and acting and being other than what it holds to be right. Danger is but the acid test which such a mind applies to the ingredients of its life. To such a mind, hardness is the characteristic of the gem, of the diamond, which thus guarantees its genuineness, its sparkling worth. Zarathustra-Nietzsche loves everything which steels the will and augments life’s force. Therefore he loves his foe, for, thanks to his foe, he never comes to a standstill and stagnates. Therefore his true friend is the one who has become his best foe, who makes him sweat, who summons him to risk hot war with him, to break a lance with him in an intellectual passage at arms in which the soul struggles for its own yea and nay. So, similarly, this Zarathustra-Nietzsche hates pity. Why? Not because he is a brute. “Kind unto the sick is Zarathustra.... Would that they were convalescent and conquering and creating a higher body for themselves!” Not because, as we have seen, so much of pity is for self’s sake and not for the sake of service, though this is an essential part of the answer.