'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 to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.'
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.82.
