terms of little kindnesses, or he may think in terms of little meannesses; but whichever it is, his thoughts are small. The danger of a man regarding himself as on an equality with God, when the inequalities are so glaringly obvious, is the danger of egotism. But banish egotism, or the tendency of the consciousness to go into spasm, and you are left with mental health. The apparent attraction of regarding yourself as a miserable sinner is that you banish pride (a form of egotism). But it is an illusion. Accuse the man-in-the-pew of being a miserable sinner, and he will smile blandly and say, “We all are”. Accuse him of being a lying hypocrite, a cheat, and a lecher, and he will be at your throat. Yet the irony is that the accusation of being a miserable sinner is worse than all the others; only being general and not particular it fails to register in the mind. There is no ready-made formula to escape from the sin of pride. The only escape is not to be proud. And hiding from the truth does not help a man to do that.
Now to return to Christ. He undoubtedly regarded himself as being on an equality with God; so much so that he is supposed to have said that anyone who had seen him had seen the Father, i.e. had seen God incarnate. Yet if the reader scours the Gospels, he will see that he absolutely refused to make egotistical claims to the effect that he was the Messiah. He avoided the mistake of egotism.
Suppose that Jesus had only had the belief or awareness that he had an equality with God to help him decide how to act, what would the result have been? In my opinion his behaviour would have been detached, remote, pious, and largely ineffective. From the stories about him, he was clearly not at all like that.
Next suppose that he believed only that he was the only begotten son of God (the flattering title given by the Church), what would the result have been?