A Man of the World

by Annie Payson Call

To love his neighbor as himself, a man must be able truly to sympathize with his neighbor and to see through his neighbor's eyes. By this I do not mean that the neighbor's point of view must be his own, but that he should be able to understand it as if it were his own. If a man does this, he can understand the wrong or the right of it much more clearly; and can, when advisable, modify his own point of view according to his neighbor's. One can easily recognize the advantage it is to a doctor, a lawyer, a minister, or a business man, to be able and willing always to grasp the point of view of other people. A doctor makes up his mind as to the best course to take in regard to his patient. The patient tells him a long story describing his own state of mind, which seems to the doctor, according to his own experience, entirely ridiculous. If he excludes all appreciation of his patient's point of view and holds harshly to his own ideas, he loses the most important means for performing a perfect cure. If he listens attentively, and earnestly tries to appreciate what may be good in his patient's ideas, so that the patient feels his sympathy, an opportunity is thus opened to lead the patient gradually to common sense. In so far as the physician closes his mind to his patient's point of view, in so far he is narrow and lacking in the true spirit of a man of the world.

A good, clear-headed lawyer should understand not only his client's point of view, but also that of his opponent. A man can never lose his own ground by truly "throwing himself on the side of his antagonist." An all-round clear-headedness is a necessity to the best growth in us of true principles. When a man's eye is single his whole body will be full of light, and such light penetrates far and wide within and along the whole horizon, and shows characters, affairs, and circumstances, for what they really are. But no man's eye can be single unless he takes a clear, unprejudiced view of his fellow men in all phases and varieties of life. The very large number and variety of people who come steadily for help to a physician or minister receive the greatest help when the physician or minister understands the world entirely without prejudice. A quiet understanding of human nature, and a brave, gentle manner of dealing with others is one of the greatest blessings that can come to any man.

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.