ng to merit His crown, doing
nothing to warrant the worship of untold worlds, commanding others to
peril themselves and put all to the proof, but Himself well out of range
of all risk, of all conflict, of all tragedy? How can we hope to love a
God we remove to a throne remote and exalted, from which He looks down
on human life, and cannot look on it as we do from the inside! Is God to
be only a dramatist, who arranges thrilling situations for others to
pass through, and assigns to each the part he is to play, but Himself
has no real interests at stake and no actual entrance into the world of
feeling, of hope, of trial?

And if a Divine Person were in the course of things to come into this
human world, to enter into our actual experiences, and feel and bear the
actual strain that we bear, it is obvious He must come incognito--not
distinguished by such marks as would bring the world to His feet, and
make an ordinary human life and ordinary human trials impossible to Him.
When sovereigns wish to ascertain for themselves how their subjects
live, they do not proclaim their approach and send in advance an army of
protection, provision, and display; they do not demand to be met by the
authorities of each town, and to be received by artificial, stereotyped
addresses, and to be led from one striking sight to another and from one
comfortable palace to another: but they leave their robes of state
behind them, they send no messenger in advance, and they mix as one of
the crowd with the crowd, exposed to whatever abuse may be going, and
living for the time on the same terms as the rank and file. This has
been done often in sport, sometimes as matter of policy or of interest,
but never as the serious method of understanding and lifting the general
habits and life of the people. Christ came among us, not as a kind of
Divine adventure to break the tedium of eternal glory, nor merely to
make personal observations on His own account, but as the requisite and
only means available for bringing the fulness of Divine help into
practical contact with mankind. But as all filth and squalor are hidden
away in the slums from the senses of the king, so that if he is to
penetrate into the burrows of the criminal classes and see the
wretchedness of the poor, he must do it incognito, so if Christ sought
to bring Divine mercy and might within reach of the vilest, He must
visit their haunts and make Himself acquainted with their habits.

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