full of grace and truth. They looked and saw but a fellow
fisherman, cooking his meal upon the shore, and they knew not that it
was Jesus.

II. Think for a moment of the earthly life of Christ, and you will
see that it was designedly linked with all the common and even the
commonest things of life.

If you or I could have conceived the great thought of some human
creature that should be the very incarnation of God, what would have
been the shape of our imaginings? Surely we should have chosen for
this earthly temple of the Highest some human form perfected in grace
and beauty by the long refinements of exalted ancestry; the child of
kings or scholars; the delicate flower of life, in whom the elements
were so subtly mixed that we should recognize them as special and
miraculous--so we might think of God manifest in man. But God chooses
for the habitation of His Spirit a peasant woman of Nazareth, humble,
poor, unconsidered.

If we could have forecast the training of such a life, how should
we have pictured it? Surely as sheltered from the coarseness of the
world, delicately nourished, sedulously cultured; but God orders
that this life should manifest itself in the house of the village
carpenter, out of reach of schools, in a little wicked town, under the
commonest conditions of poverty, obscurity, and toil.

If you and I could have imagined the introduction of this life of
lives to the world, how should we picture that? Surely we should have
pictured it coming with pomp and display that would at once have
attracted all eyes; but God orders that it shall come without
observation, unfolding its quiet beauty like the wayside flower, which
there are few to see and very few to love. Commonness: that is the
great note of the incarnation and the purposed feature of Christ's
earthly life.

He reaffirms His fraternity in common life. The disciples could not
imagine that as possible; nor can we. And why not? For two reasons,
one of which is that we have forgotten the dignity of common life.

1. Dignity is for us almost synonymous with some kind of separation
from common life; it dwells in palaces, not in cottages; it inheres in
culture, but is inconceivable in narrow knowledge; and to the great
mass of men it is, alas! the attribute of wealth, of fine raiment,
of social isolation. But we have not learned even the alphabet
of Christ's gospel unless we have come to see that the only true
_in_dignity in human life is sin, mean