Just as the pious soul of the Salvation Army employs uniforms and military customs, Lindner had taken certain soldierly forms of thought into his service; indeed, he did not even shy away from concessions to Nietzsche’s “man of power,” who was still a stumbling block for civil society at that time but was for Lindner a whetstone as well. He liked to say of Nietzsche that he could not be characterized as a bad man, but that his doctrine was quite extreme and life-denying, the reason for this being that he rejected pity; for thus he had failed to recognize the wonderful reciprocal gift of the weak, which is to make the strong man gentle! And opposing to this his own experience, he thought, full of joyful aspiration: “Truly great souls do not pay homage to a barren cult of the self; instead they awaken in others a sense of their own majesty by bending down to them and, if need be, sacrificing themselves for them!” Two young lovers were coming up the path towards him, closely entwined; he looked into their eyes, confident of victory and with an expression of friendly reproof that was meant to encourage virtue. But it was a rather ordinary couple, and the young lout who formed its male component pinched his eyes together and said: “Boo!” Lindner, who was not prepared for this vulgar and derisive threat, was taken aback: but he acted as if he did not notice. He loved decisive action, and looked around for a policeman, who ought to be nearby to guarantee the public safety of honor; but his foot struck against a stone, the hasty stumbling movement scared up a swarm of sparrows that had been feasting at God’s table on a heap of horse manure, and the sparrows’ rustling flight warned Lindner, enabling him, an instant before falling ignominiously, to clear the double obstacle with a balletically disguised leap. He did not look back, and after a while he was very satisfied with himself. “One must be hard as a diamond and tender as a mother!” he thought, finding happy support in that seventeenth-century maxim.