Look not every man on his own things. — This verse similarly describes the positive effect of this “being of one mind” as consisting in power of understanding and sympathy towards “the things of others” — not merely the interests, but also the ideas and feelings of others. To “look upon” here is something more than “to seek” (as in Philippians 2:21). It expresses that insight into the thoughts, hopes, aspirations of others, which only a self-forgetting love can give, as well as the care to consider their welfare and happiness. Yet by the word “also” we see that St. Paul does not, in the spirit of some forms of modern transcendentalism, denounce all self-consciousness and self-love, as in a bad sense “selfish.” For man is individual as well as social; he can subordinate “his own things” to “the things of others,” but cannot ignore them.

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