Thinkers, of such wide historical outlook and unimpeachable detachment from immediate controversial interest as Prof. Wilhelm Dilthey and Dr. Edward Caird, have brought out, with admirable force, this greater fulness of content offered by the Synoptists, and how the Pauline-Joannine writings give us the first and most important of those concentrations upon, and in part philosophic and mystical reinterpretations of, certain constituents of the original happenings, actions and message, as apprehended and transmitted by the first eye-witnesses and believers.[112]--Here I would but try and drive home the apparently vague, but in reality ever pressing and concrete, lesson afforded by the clear and dominant fact of these two groups within the New Testament itself:--of how no mere accumulation of external happenings, or of external testimony as to their having happened,--no amount of history or of institutionalism, taken as sheer, purely positive givennesses,--can anywhere be found, or can anywhere suffice for the human mind and conscience, in the apprehension and embodiment of the truth. For although, in Our Lord’s most literally transmitted sayings and doings, this continuous and inalienable element of the apprehending, organizing, vitalizing mind and heart,--on His part above all, but also on the part of His several hearers and chroniclers,--can mostly still be traced and must everywhere be assumed: yet it is in the Pauline-Joannine literature that the ever important, the rightly and fruitfully “subjective,” the speculative and emotional, the mystical and the volitional strain can best be studied, both as to its necessity and as to its special character and dangers, because here it is developed to the relative exclusion of the other factors of complete religion. 4. _The exclusive emotionalism of Dionysius and Jacopone._ Now if even in St. Paul and St. John there is a strong predominance of these reflective-emotional elements, in Dionysius and Jacopone they threaten to become exclusive of everything else. Especially is this the case with the Pseudo-Areopagite, steeped as he is in reflection upon reflections and in emotion upon emotions, often of the most subtle kind: a Christian echo, with curiously slight modifications, of Neo-Platonism in its last stage,--hence, unfortunately, of the over-systematic and largely artificial Proclus, instead of the predominantly experimental and often truly sublime Plotinus. And even Jacopone, although he has distinctly more of the historic element, is still predominantly reflective-emotional, and presents us with many a hardly modified Platonic or Stoic doctrine, derived no doubt from late Graeco-Roman writers and their mediaeval Christian echoes. 5. _Catherine’s interpretation of the Gospel Ideal._