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 p