When Jesus Christ healed a man on the Sabbath day, He not only ignored the conventional standards of His nation, but He appeared to disobey one of the fundamental commandments of the law. The Pharisees, and all the people about Him who stood well in the eyes of the world, were angrily indignant. It is not difficult to imagine, after it was all over, a kind and conventional soul coming to the Lord and asking Him why He had not waited until the next day before carrying out His intention;—He would not have had to wait long, and the displeasure of the Pharisees would have been avoided. "Would it not have been more charitable to respect the religious scruples of the Jews? Is it not wrong to fly needlessly in the face of respectable public opinion? Was it not unwise needlessly to break the letter of the commandment, even while keeping its spirit?" Some doubting soul, who wanted to believe in the goodness of the Lord and the purity of His motive, might well have put all these questions to Him with a sincere and conscientious desire to serve. And yet this doubter, with all his conscientious kindness, would have been blind and stupid. For only the self-righteous or the morally stupid could fail to understand that, in healing a sick man on the Sabbath day, our Lord was establishing a new precedent of a truer and deeper obedience for all mankind. The Pharisees were convinced of their own goodness; it would not have occurred to them as possible that they were narrow, provincial, and self-righteous. They would not have admitted for an instant the possibility of any circumstances under which it might be right to perform a radical cure on the Sabbath day; and they persuaded themselves that they were "doing God service" when they subjected to an ignominious execution the man who had so roused all their personal and selfish antagonism. The Pharisees were hopelessly unable to understand Him, but that was because of their own blindness. In laying down the principle that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, our Lord was expressing an eternal truth, not only to the world of His own time but to the world of all ages.
To associate the idea of a man of the world with a knowledge of its dark places and shallow forms alone, tends to belittle and degrade our conception of the world; whereas the world, so far from being only dark or shallow, is well worth knowing and serving, provided it is made to serve, in its turn, all that is vigorous and wholesome in man. We should recognize the beauty and power of the things of this world as servants to our highest law; it is only the perversion of those things that is to be renounced.
The true man of the world understands perverted human nature,—from the gourmand to the keen political sharper; he is a man who is never deceived by appearances, and who sees the real character beneath its external polish; a man who, with his clearer understanding, takes each perversion at its true value, understands the Iagos and the Don Juans equally well, with no slightest taste for either. They are all forms of disease to him. He can trace Iago's villainy to its own destruction and Don Juan's sensuality to its worse than satiety.
Again, a true man of the world is a man who knows, and loves, and is a part of all the wholesomeness in the world; a man who is quickly at home in every variety of good form, because the instincts of a gentleman are the same all the world over, although customs may differ entirely; a man who, while accustomed to all conventions and respecting them where they properly belong, is easily and happily at home without them; a man who, while preferring fine instincts as well as strong characters in his fellow men, is so alive to the best in human nature that he can find the gold thread anywhere in the wax, if there is a gold thread there; a man whose thoughts are so much at home in fresh air that he at once detects a close or tainted atmosphere, but can keep the unpleasant sensation to himself; who never intrudes his love of fresh air upon others, but, being surrounded by it himself, enjoys it habitually and as a matter of course. Such a man can never be caught unawares; he is a gentleman in all emergencies, because he cannot be otherwise than himself, and he never appears what he is not.
A true man of the world is not of the world primarily, although he serves the world and is served by it; it is to him always a means to a higher end,—never an end in itself. It was of true men of the world that the Lord spoke when He said, "I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil!"
III
From the point of view of good we can see and understand evil, but from the point of view of evil we can neither see nor understand real goodness. A man to understand the world must be in the process of gaining his freedom from its evils. He must be learning to live according to universal and interior standards, not according to the standards of a special time, or of the people who happen to be about him; and, in the process, he will learn that faithfulness to his own sincere perception of universal truth will lead him eventually into true harmony with the best in others. We know of only one man in the history of the world who lived his whole life in a manner consistent with his highest standards.
The world is a great, well-kept school. No one who believes in immortality can possibly doubt that the short space of time we are here is meant for training,—training to prepare us for our work hereafter, whatever that may be, by doing our work here well. If we start with the belief that the world is a school, and that we do not want to stay in the primary class, but that we want to go through all the classes and to graduate honorably,—if that conviction is strong in our minds, it is astonishing to realize what a new aspect life will have for us. In general and in every detail life will be full of living interest. No trouble will be too hard to bear; there will be no circumstances that we would run away from. We shall want to learn all our lessons, to pass all our examinations, and to get the living power for use to others which is the logical result.