"Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects."
— C.S. Lewis
Source: The Weight of Glory
Nature, author
Views: 613
"Although for the present I am travelling not as a missionary but as a naturalist—and that without any scruple, since the study and knowledge of the works of God tend to the glory of the Creator of nature—my labours and my frequent excursions do not entitle me to dispense myself from all the duties of my ministry."
— Armand David
Source: Journal de mon troisième voyage d'exploration dans l'empire chinois (1875), vol. I, 24 December 1872 (translated from the French)
Nature, the Creator, the Book
Views: 502
"The French Jesuit Claude de Visdelou (1656–1737) was one of the missionaries sent to China by Louis XIV in 1687, and he acquired a wide knowledge of the Chinese language and literature. When the papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon came to China in 1705 to settle the question of the Chinese Rites, Visdelou was the only Jesuit favourable to their prohibition. Secretly consecrated bishop in Macau in 1709, he went on to Pondicherry, where he lived in great retirement in the house of the French Capuchins until his death nearly thirty years later, working almost solely on the more than 500 Chinese volumes he had taken with him."
— Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia, "Claude de Visdelou" (after the Catholic Encyclopedia)