A Man of the World

It is absolutely impossible to rid ourselves of prejudice without at the same time gaining freedom from self-love. If a man is favorably prejudiced in a certain direction, it is because there is something in the opposite direction which offends his selfishness. To gain freedom from the prejudice he must see and acknowledge heartily the selfishness in himself which is at its root. This is often a difficult thing to do, for a prejudice may have come to us through the selfish egotism of some far-away ancestor, and may have become rooted in our own personality before we realized its true nature.

To be a man of the world one must be able to understand the world, – not three or four corners of it, but the whole of it. This expansion of mind and soul is possible to every man who will first understand himself, and no man can understand himself who is blindly indulging his own selfishness. Every day we are seeing people who are living and acting in the grossest selfishness and they do not know it. Such people sometimes frighten those who are observing them.

"If John Smith," I say to myself, "is the human beast that I see him to be, and does not know it, perhaps I am unconsciously just as brutal as John, and do not know it; and if I am, how can I find it out?"

We must have the habit of first casting the beam out of our own eye, before we can be ready to help take the mote from our brother's eye; and the only possible way to be sure of finding ourselves out, is to be quietly, willingly, open to criticism; to take every criticism, not with a desire to prove ourselves right, but with an earnest desire to find out and act upon the truth. I do not mean necessarily to invite criticism, – it will come fast enough without invitation, – but to welcome it when it appears, and to try at once to see ourselves with the eyes of our critics.

So simple and straightforward is the road to travel, when we sincerely want to become true men of the world, that the expansion of heart and mind resulting from a steady walking upon this road must seem impossible to worldly men. And yet the narrowness of worldly men is in its essence similar to the narrowness of the dwellers in a small, gossiping country town. The worldly men have more superficial knowledge than the inhabitants of the country town, but they do not necessarily have any stronger grasp on the world-wide principles of human nature. Worldliness is the love of ease and the pride of life upon a low plane of commonplace existence, but a true knowledge of the world requires a higher elevation.

The ascent of narrow paths and steep inclines leads to the mountain top; thence the outlook is wide, and the heights and depths of the landscape take their proper places in their true relation to each other. The single-minded drudgery and toil which produces character leads also to the wisdom of the seer. Only from the point of view of unselfish love and truth can we get a well-balanced and extended view of the heights and depths and commonplaces of the world.

We have seen that a man, to know the world, must know and understand its individuals and types. We have seen that it is out of the question to understand other individuals, so long as we are clogged by our own selfishness or prejudice. We know that, to understand the point of view of another person, we must be clear, open-minded, and well grounded in true principles. We cannot understand another person's point of view truly when we are swayed and blinded by its influence, so that it sweeps us off our feet and takes possession of us in spite of ourselves. We must have true standards to judge others by, and those must be standards which we have tried and proved, over and over, for ourselves.

At once the most interesting and the most profitable character-study in the world is the life of the one man whose life was consistently faithful to a standard which was universally true and all His own, and that standard He has given us for ours. Many of us fail in our interpretation of it, but, if we work diligently to try it and to prove it, and are openly willing and glad to acknowledge whenever we have misinterpreted it, we shall be steadily enlightened as to its true meaning.

The delight of applying the laws of science and of seeing them work, the positive joy of watching the certain result of a well-managed scientific experiment is known to many a chemist or electrician. But the joy of testing the practical working of spiritual laws should be deeper, and more quiet, and more expanding than all other delights; for the spiritual law, if it exists at all, must underlie all material law.

Just as our problems in chemistry or in physics must fail over and over before we have the quiet satisfaction of seeing them work, so must we go through test after test before we can be firmly established in all the laws of human relations.

The standard of character and life represented by the idea of the man of the world has been dwarfed by a superficial notion of the meaning of "the world." "The world" means many things to many men, and these different meanings are of various degrees of truth and falsehood; but we shall find that, generally speaking, they are more and more true in proportion as the people who hold them are possessed of vigorous character. In art and literature we know that the greatest truth and the deepest beauty is that which appeals at all times to all men. It appeals to the universal human heart and mind, and thus it is inconceivable that the human race should ever tire of Shakespere, or Dante, or the Bible. Such books, whatever personal opinions or beliefs we may attach to them, are universally acceptable to all men, because they appeal to common human experience and apply the principles of irresistible human logic. They are the books of the world.

The world itself is an organism corresponding to that of the individual man, and the particular individual whose heart and mind lives and thinks most nearly in harmony with the best life and thought of the world is its truest citizen. On the other hand, the individual whose motives and interests in life are confined to the narrowest circle of experience represents the extreme type of provincialism. The difference between these two extremes is not a matter of long, varied, or conventional experience, but of experience in those elements of human nature which are at its root and not at its surface. The statesman, the capitalist, the experienced traveller, although they may have intercourse with men in large classes and masses, may be essentially petty in the foundations of their character. These, then, are not men of the world in the true sense; for, if they were, we should have to mean by "the world" numerical or mechanical conceptions of men, purely intellectual conceptions of their thoughts, or geographical ideas regarding the inhabitants of the earth's surface. None of these things has any universal quality, unless it is united to the power of human character and passion, which carries weight with all men at all times and in all places. The inhabitant of a country village may be, according to his quality, either a man of the village or a man of the world. It depends upon his breadth of mind, his largeness of heart, and the depth to which his character will absorb the best results of his experience. Whatever is purely local, without being rooted in a general human need, – whatever is purely personal, without being founded on a universal human principle, – whatever is purely sectarian or national, or pertaining to a class or particular clique of persons, without being rooted in the same general human interests and laws, must, to that extent, be petty, provincial, trivial, and comparatively useless. Character is, and always has been, the motive power of the world; and only through finding his own development of character in the service of the world can the individual man find his appointed place as its citizen. There is no law higher than that which is human, in the sense that it is the only guide to the growth of what is best in human life. This essential human law, – which is so different from that which worldly self-interest has organized for its own protection, – is that which man derives from the Divine. It is the world as made and sustained by the heart and mind of God of which man must be the citizen, and only as such is he truly "a Man of the World."