class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 52]"/> 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