“I am a man and nothing human do I consider alien to me,” said Terence two thousand years ago.

A man who thoroughly knows the world must be capable of understanding all phases of life,-not only those of his own country, class, profession, or sect.  It is the humanity in all its phases that he loves and understands,-not the phase itself; and therefore nothing that is human can be so remote as to be unintelligible to his mind or without the power of appeal to his heart.  Iago could never understand honesty or generosity.  Don Juan could never understand chastity.  On the other hand it is possible for an honest man to understand Iago, and for a clean man to understand Don Juan.  Although in neither case will the man who understands sympathize with the sin, in both cases the understanding will be clear and comprehensive.  A child cannot understand either Iago or Don Juan, neither can a childish man; but a truly childlike man can understand all phases of temptation and sin, and estimate them justly.

There is an innocence of ignorance, and there is an innocence of wisdom.  The innocence of ignorance is involuntary.  It is innocence because it cannot be anything else.  A little child is in the innocence of ignorance, and it is from that protective innocence that we feel the fresh, happy atmosphere of childhood.  The innocence of wisdom is possible only to those who have known temptation and, through overcoming it, have learned to recognize all sin for what it really is,-the filth and disease of the soul, and to avoid it as such.  The fresh life that springs from such struggle and conquest of selfish tendencies brings with it a vigor of innocence which has a quality of life akin to that of a healthy child, with the added power and insight of a man’s maturity.  Whatever form or phase of temptation his fellow men may be in, such a man, from his own experience, has found the means of understanding them.  He has found the means of understanding his neighbor, whether the neighbor is immersed in self-indulgence, is struggling desperately to gain his freedom, or is well along upon the upward path.

A man who can only understand certain special phases of human nature is narrow and provincial, however he may assume the air of a man of the world; and the false assumption of a broad understanding renders him practically still more narrow and provincial, for it stands in the way of his learning from those who have it in their power to instruct him.  But the true man of the world, whose breadth of vision and penetration of insight are the result of a working familiarity with universal principles in practical life, detests sin without condemning the sinner, and is not befooled by the shallow pretensions of the provincial Pharisee.

To know the world we must not only be able to understand all phases of it in general, but we must also understand the various types in particular.  There are nations, there are grades and phases of life in each nation, and there are individuals in each phase.  There is as great a difference between the individuals of a small community of people, if one has the eye to detect it, as there is between nations.

I remember once talking with a famous anthropologist.  All men were to him simply representations of ages, nations, or families.  No man was a man in himself; he was simply a specimen.  It gave to a little everyday person a very keen sense of the vastness of humanity in general, past and present, to hear this scientific man talk.  He had the habit of swinging all the nations of the world into his conversation as easily as if he lived with them every day, as in his habitual thought he truly did.  Whenever I would speak to him of a friend or a relative he would characterize him by his national and family tendency.  To talk with the Professor for an hour or two was most enlightening and expanding; but a long acquaintance proved that a man, even in the region of large anthropological and geographical ideas, could be just as narrow and provincial as the self-appointed moral censor of a country town.  The human body and the human mind, in general, seemed to mean a very great deal to him, but man as an individual soul meant nothing at all.

Some of the greatest diplomats, who have stood out as clever in their dealings with nations, have been limited in the extreme when their lives took them outside of the rut of their own immediate work.  Statesmen who have dealt cleverly with nations have blundered sadly in their dealings with individual men, blundered sometimes when their mistakes would react upon their national influence.  And yet so established were they in the selfish rut of their national diplomacy, so provincial were they in the knowledge of individual human nature, that they went on blundering, until many a time their mistakes led them almost, if not quite, to national disaster.  The best lawyers know that to do their work truly they must be able to judge particular cases and special circumstances by standards which to the majority of minds do not exist.  For want of such clear understanding of human nature which comes from an original instinct for truth itself,-as distinguished from the cut-and-dried application of conventional habit,-lawyers have often failed.

Conventional standards are the common standards of the majority; but, although they are perhaps more serviceable than any others in the achievement of commonplace success, they are invariably inadequate on a really high and simple plane of human endeavor.  It is rare to find an active man engaged in worldly business who recognizes the laws of simple unselfishness and truth as having any practical existence in human affairs; but it is still more rare to find such a man understanding the true relation between essential goodness and the conventional principles of morality.  There are times when those who act from higher standards must appear to contradict entirely all conventional modes of life, but they do not necessarily oppose such conventions, for through a courageous adherence to the spirit of the law they eventually bring new life to its letter.  The true man of the world is he who can express his essential goodness and truth in wise and appropriate ways, and in terms which must be, in the long run, intelligible to all kinds of men.

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!”