The first of these in importance is undoubtedly "the Servant of the Lord." We saw when examining this idea that it was an ideal of a nation rather than of an individual, and yet it was upon this that Jesus fixed, and it was this idea that seemed to mould His whole conception of His mission. According to Luke, the first discourse of Jesus took place in the Synagogue at Nazareth, where He set forth His programme and policy, and stated them to be identical with those the prophet had outlined for the nation centuries before (Luke iv. 16-21; Isa. lxi. 1, 2); and the evangelist Matthew sees in the methods of Jesus a fulfilment of the prophecy of the Servant (Matt. xii. 18-21; Isa. xlii. 1-4). It was probably as Jesus saw the clouds gather about His life and disaster began to threaten that He was led to study the career of that Servant and see that it involved suffering, being despised and rejected of men; and so He came to find the key to the mystery of His Cross in that classic of the vicarious life, the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. Jesus was probably the first to interpret that passage in a Messianic sense. His reason for adopting the title of "the Son of Man" is exceedingly difficult to trace; it may be said that no completely satisfactory explanation of the origin or meaning of the term has yet been discovered, and in the present state of research on the subject it would be folly to commit ourselves to any of the theories that have been propounded. We can only keep in mind the various facts, which the use of this title in the Gospels presents to us. It is clear that Jesus did not intend the title to be a declaration to the world that He had accepted the Messianic call; for all along it was His deliberate purpose to conceal His Messiahship, and for reasons that are obvious, when we consider the difference between His conception of Messianic function and that of the Jews of His day. Again, although there is a slight difference between Daniel, where we only hear of "one like unto a son of man," and Jesus who calls Himself "_the_ son of man," yet when challenged by the high-priest Jesus certainly quotes from Daniel (Dan. vii. 13; Mark xiv. 62). Now in Daniel it is not a person who is figured by this title, so much as a humane kingdom which is to replace the kingdoms that were more like beasts in their character. It is only in the Book of Enoch that the Son of Man is definitely identified with the Messiah. Did Jesus ever read that Book, or were its ideas at all commonly known? If so we should have to concede that the Son of Man meant the Messiah, both to Jesus and to the people, and yet this is an apparent contradiction of His general motive in keeping the Messiahship secret.