What, now, if the true pitiful love, the true mercy to men, were to _harden_ them, to make them free from what meant only suffering to them? It is, to be sure, very much more difficult to make men themselves “hard,” so that the burden lying on their backs can not crush them than it is to indulge their weakness and sensitiveness and to leave them as they are. Indulgent parental hearts would a thousand times rather remove all life’s burdens from their children than to place burdens upon their children which they might learn to bear. So often our pity plays us a sorry trick—we would rather do something for men than to repress our pity, silence it, and then teach men how they themselves can do what is good and necessary for them. We speak of a ministrant love, meaning a love which knows nothing higher than to provide comforts, avert trials, spare vexations, and everything which could shake a man to his foundations. How much greater a service of love it would be to lead man to himself, make him strong that he might be equal to what we had thought we must take away from him! Pray, not for easier tasks, lighter burdens, but for more power! This Nietzschean love is not only a greater love, it also requires a greater, more tiresome work, it requires a constant conquest of our pitying weakness, it requires a courageous faith in man and a firm earnest appraisal of his power. And how entirely different a service of friendship do we render a friend if we show a hard love to him, if he break a tooth on us, as Nietzsche says, because we do not flatter and fit him, but compel him, out of love compel him, to assert himself against us, and to withstand our defense of our rights against him! Foolish men seek their friends among the _Jasagern_, most preferably, among those who are of their own opinion in everything. They then call this an ideal friendship: two souls and one thought, two hearts and one beat! But in such a friendship, their best, their own soul, their sense of truth, and their courage for the truth, soon rusts. To spare a friend the disillusion which he would suffer if he felt an antagonism, an opposition, in the friendship, they have pity on him, they learn to keep silent, and silence soon becomes a lie. Since they dare not cause the friend the grief of discovering to him these lies, they lie more, lie life-long,—all out of pity, out of their weak tender love. How much nobler and greater that friendship whose ideal Nietzsche sketches for us, in which we are gripped from the outset in a friend’s contradiction and hostility! We seek and love in him precisely what is not attuned to us, but is his own, and must forever remain his very own. Such hard love which gives the friend a “camp-bed” and not one as “soft as downy pillows are” and requires the like in return is the proudest manliest friendship, is alone what brings our sluggish and pampered natures forward, and makes us stronger, freer, richer in understanding and experience.