His great design, the secret desire of his heart, Jesus disclosed on one occasion to the most intimate circle of his disciples. He led them to a retired spot at the foot of Mount Hermon, not far from Cæsarea Philippi, the capital of the Tetrarch Philip, where the Jordan rushes forth from mighty rocks, and in that remote solitude he revealed to them the hidden object of his thoughts. But he contrived his discourse in such a manner that it appeared to be his disciples who at last elicited from him the revelation that he considered himself the expected Messiah. He asked his followers, "Who do men say that I, the son of man, am?" Some replied that he was thought to be Elijah, the expected forerunner of the Messiah; others, again, that he was the prophet whose advent Moses had predicted; upon which Jesus asked them, "But whom say ye that I am?" Simon Peter answered and said, "Thou art the Christ." Jesus praised Peter's discernment and admitted that he was the Messiah, but forbade his disciples from divulging the truth, or, for the present, from speaking about it at all. Such was the mysteriously-veiled birth of Christianity. When, a few days later, the most trusted of his disciples, Simon Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, James and John, timidly suggested that Elijah must precede the Messiah, Jesus declared that Elijah had already appeared, though unrecognized, in the person of the Baptist. Had Jesus from the very commencement of his career nourished these thoughts in the depths of his soul, or had they first taken shape when the many followers he had gained seemed to make their realization possible? Jesus never publicly called himself the Messiah, but made use of other expressions which were doubtless current among the Essenes. He spoke of himself as "the son of man," alluding probably to Daniel vii. 13, "One like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days," a verse which referred probably to the whole people and its Messianic future, but which at that time was made to point to the Messiah himself. There was yet one other name which Jesus applied to himself in his Messianic character--the mysterious words "Son of God," probably taken from the seventh verse of the second Psalm, "The Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee." Was this expression used by Jesus figuratively, or did he wish it to be taken in a literal sense? As far as we know, he never explained himself clearly on that subject, not even at a later date, when it was on account of the meaning attached to those words that he was undergoing his trial. His followers afterwards disagreed among themselves upon that matter, and the various ways in which they interpreted that ambiguous expression divided them into different sects, among which a new form of idolatry unfolded itself.