To-day the phrase is returning into religious speech to signify the permeation of society by the mind of Christ, which cannot be far from what it meant to the earliest disciples. It is significant that the author of the fourth gospel virtually dropped the phrase altogether, that Paul preferred other expressions as a rule, and that it was merged and lost in the idea of the church. Closely bound up with the "Kingdom of God" is the name Messiah, with a similarly wide range of meanings. The question has also been raised as to how far Jesus identified himself with the Messiah. It might be more pertinent to ask with which Messiah. On the whole, the importance of the matter can be gauged by the fate of the word. It was translated into Greek, and very soon Christos, or Chrestos, was a proper name and hardly a title at all except in apologetics, where alone the conception retained some importance. The Divine Son and the Divine Logos--terms which Jesus did not use--superseded the old Hebrew title, at any rate in the Gentile world, and this could hardly have occurred if the idea had been of fundamental moment in Jesus' mind and speech. If he used the name, as seems probable, it too must have been subordinated to his master-thought of God's fatherhood. It would then imply at most a close relation to the purposes of God, and a mission to men, the stewardship of thoughts that would put mankind on a new footing with God. The idea of his being a mediator in the Pauline sense is foreign to the gospels, and the later conception of a purchase of mankind from the devil, or from the justice of God, by the blood of a victim is still more alien to Jesus' mind. [Sidenote: The cross]