Not merely in these days of war, but in all our human relations all the
time we greatly need to get the interior vision which enables us to
understand from within those with whom we live and work. Nobody sees life
correctly until he has corrected his own views by a true appreciation of
the views of others. From the outside it is impossible to estimate any
life fairly. We have long ago learned that we can get no true account of
any historical character unless we have a historian who can put himself
in the place of the person he is describing. He must have imagination
and be able to see clearly the conditions and forces, the influences and
the atmosphere in which the man lived. The problems which he had to deal
with, the conceptions which governed men’s thoughts when he lived—all
these must be understood, before we can get any estimate of the man
himself. The same sort of imagination is necessary to judge the person
who lives next door. We dare not pronounce upon him until we know all
that he has to face. If we could once feel his quivering spirit and could
see his inward struggles, we could not set up our private tribunal and
pass our cold individual judgment upon him. The real remedy for this hard
critical spirit which breaks society up into independent units is the
spirit of love, the spirit of otherism.
The moment we put ourselves in the place of others, and pronounce no
judgment upon persons until we have seen all the circumstances of their
life, a new state of things at once appears. Genuine sympathy, clear
interior insight into the personality of others, immediately creates a
new world. The trouble too often is that we see all the defects in others
and forget our own. We want to take the mote out of another person’s eye
while all the time there is a whole fence rail in our own. Christ’s rule
is to make oneself perfect before one goes to correcting others. “Let him
who is without sin cast the first stone.”
There is another situation also which would be remedied if we learned
to put ourselves in the other person’s place—if we had the spirit of
otherism. Christ sums it up in the proverb about _casting pearls before
swine_, _i.e._ giving what is a misfit. Many of our well-meant charities
are of this sort. We blunder in our efforts to help poor needy people,
because we do not get their point of view. We do not live our way into
their lives. There is no fit between our gift and their need. They get a
stone for bread.
The same thing happens in much of our public speaking. Many persons have
the barbarous habit of never imagining the listeners’ point of view. They
go on speaking as unconscious of the condition confronting them as the
hose pipe is when the water is turned on. The remedy again is otherism.
It is impossible to help anybody with a message until you can in some
measure _share_ his life.
“The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another’s need.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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