Annie Payson Call

“ We cannot understand another person's point of view truly when we are swayed and blinded [Pg 53] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 21] mind or without the power of appeal to his heart. ”

“ 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 [Pg 57] irresistible human logic. They are the books of the world. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The true man of the world understands [Pg 36] 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. ”

“ All men were to him simply representations of ages, nations, or families. No man was a [Pg 26] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. [Pg 25]
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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The world and the flesh are servants, and good servants; they are necessary instruments for the carrying out of the Divine purpose in human life. But the devil is merely the perversion of good [Pg 16] things to useless, trivial, and degrading ends. He has no power in himself except as we give him power, and we give him power every day when we associate the idea of the world with that of the villains in it, and when we debase the flesh by not realizing the clean, good service for which it is intended. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 51] world-wide principles of human nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 52] truth can we get a well-balanced and extended view of the heights and depths and commonplaces of the world. ”

“ The loathsome diseases of the body which are liable to overtake a Don Juan may only be spoken of, or thought of, as a [Pg 14] means of removing the blindness of those who, from dwelling upon the sensations of the body, come to think of sin as pleasant. When their blindness is removed, the least touch of the sensuality which causes the disease will fill them with wholesome horror. It is wonderfully provided by the Creator that any sensation, which is selfishly indulged in, any sensation that a man remains in for its own sake, must lead first to satiety,—and then to worse than satiety and death. ”