The habitual use of the _Song of Songs_ as symbolic of the Christ and his Church reminds us that symbolism is essentially poetic. It was the usual poetic of medieval preaching in interpreting not only the Scriptures, but all human experience. As behind the word lay spiritual meaning, so behind the veil of the senses lay the realities of life. The so-called “otherworldliness” of medieval preaching is no ignoring of physical facts; it is a sustained and consistent call to see through them. What medieval philosophy defined as seeing “in the aspect of eternity” (_sub specie æternitatis_) medieval preaching inculcated as a habit of vision. The habit might, indeed, degenerate, as in that popular manual of the fourteenth century, the _Speculum humanæ salvationis_,[31] into extravagance or minute formalism; but even so it kept some view of history as a providential progress. It might rise, on the other hand, to express the immediate apprehension of the mystic, the vision of spiritual genius. But the distinction of the medieval mystic is rather in degree than in kind. The whole age is characteristically habituated to mysticism. No other poetic vision is equal to Dante’s; but no other form of poetry in his age, whether in verse or in sermon, is commoner than the vision. Not only to the rapt was the visible world eloquent of the unseen eternal. Full, indeed, is everything of supernal mysteries, abounding each in its special sweetness if the eye that beholds be but attentive, as of him who knows how to suck honey from the stone and oil from the hardest rock. St. Bernard, _De Laudibus Virginis Matris_, I. 1; PL 183: 56. In the following sermon of this series St. Bernard refers seriatim to the accepted prefigurations of the Blessed Virgin. She is the perennial antagonist of the serpent (Genesis iii. 15), the _mulier fortis_ of Solomon (Proverbs xxxi. 10), the burning bush (Exodus iii. 2), Aaron’s budding rod (Numbers xvii. 8), Isaiah’s rod from the root of Jesse (xi. 1), the rod that smote the rock (Exodus xvii. 6) and divided the sea (Exodus xiv. 16), Gideon’s fleece (Judges vi. 37-40), the woman who is the Lord’s new creation (Jeremiah xxxi. 22). The prefigurations of this list had an obvious appeal in sermons through being familiar in hymns, in sculpture, in glass. Evidently St. Bernard loved them for their poetry; but he is also convinced of their sanction. He even formulates the theory of symbolic prefiguration.