and this is expressed in the various titles which were
applied to Him, or which He applied to Himself.
A brief survey of these will suffice to give an
outline of His person and functions in the new
order of things which His mission introduced.

(a) The first is His divine Sonship.

According to the gospels the consciousness which
Jesus had of His Sonship was a consciousness of
purpose, a consciousness of being sent to fulfil the
ends of God on earth. It is the good pleasure of
the Father to give men the kingdom ( Luke xii. 32),
and this boon is mediated through Jesus, who reveals
to men the true nature of God their King and Father,
and dies to inaugurate His reign on earth. The
messianic consciousness was the specific form which
this sense of vocation assumed for Jesus, but it
was determined and shaped by his inner conscious-
ness of God's character as His Father and the Father
of men. This is of fundamental importance, and it
requires to be held firmly in order to see the
relevant data in their true proportions.

The voice of divine approval at the baptism and
at the transfiguration, which hails Jesus as the Son
of God, denotes primarily His consecration to the
will of the Father. But the consciousness of Sonship
did not date from the baptism; otherwise it would
be no more than His consecration to the messianic
task which now dawned upon Him. His con-
ception of the latter cannot be understood apart
from the deeper relationship of His nature to God
which underlay it. The salient feature of the baptism-
stories, so far as the theology of the gospels is con-
cerned, is that they denote the filial rather than the
messianic consciousness of Jesus at the outset of

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