Still plainer expression is given to the ecstatic passion of the sensual Ego in a sacramental hymn (No. vii. of the _Spiritual Songs_): "Few know the secret of love, feel for ever unsatisfied, for ever athirst. The divine significance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is an enigma to the carnal mind. But he who even once has drunk in the breath of life from warm, beloved lips, whose heart has melted in the quivering flames of holy fire, whose eyes have been opened to fathom the unfathomable depths of heaven--he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever more. Who has yet discerned the transcendent meaning of the earthly body? Who can say that he understands the blood? The day is coming when all body will be one body; then the beatified pair will float in heavenly blood. Oh! that the ocean were already reddening, that the rocks were softening into fragrant flesh! The sweet repast never ends, love is never satisfied. Never can it have the beloved near enough, close enough to its inmost self. By lips that are ever more tenderly amorous, the heavenly nutriment is ever more eagerly seized and transformed. Hotter and hotter burns the passion of the soul, thirstier, ever thirstier grows the heart; and so the feast of love endures from everlasting to everlasting. Had those who abstain but once tasted of it, they would forsake everything and seat themselves beside us at the table of longing, which is ever furnished with guests. They would comprehend the infinite fulness of love, and extol our feast of the Body and the Blood."[5] These lines give us an excellent idea of the nature and main characteristics of mysticism. Mysticism retains all the old religious forms, but it truly _feels_ their significance; it speaks the same language as orthodoxy, but it changes a dead language into a living one. Herein lay the secret of its victory in the Middle Ages over that dry, formal scholasticism which it consumed in its glow. This made it the precursor of the Reformation. The mystic needs no external dogma; in his pious rapture he is his own priest. But, as his spiritual life is altogether an inward life, he does not abolish external dogma, and in the end actually becomes a sacerdotalist. In mystically prophetic words Novalis foretells the coming of the new kingdom of sacred darkness:--