Nature is Our Sister

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives ot the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemnt to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. (G.K. Chesterton)