and regular in Nature which in these parables is
presented for our study; the yearly harvest, not the three years'
famine; the constant care and justice of God, not the "special
providence" or the "special judgment." We need not wait for
catastrophes to trace the finger of God. As for Christian poetry and
art, we do not expect to find any theory of aesthetic in the New
Testament; but we may perhaps extract from the precept quoted above
the canon that the highest beauty that we can discern resides in the
real and natural, and only demands the seeing eye to find it.

In the Greek Fathers we find great stress laid on the glories of
Nature as a revelation of God. Cyril says, "The wider our
contemplation of creation, the grander will be our conception of God."
And Basil uses the same language. We find, indeed, in these writers a
marked tendency to exalt the religious value of natural beauty, and to
disparage the function of art--a premonition, perhaps, of iconoclasm.
Pagan art, which was decaying before the advent of Christ, could not,
it appears, be quietly Christianised and carried on without a break.

The true Nature-Mysticism is prominent in St. Francis of Assisi. He
loves to see in all around him the pulsations of one life, which
sleeps in the stones, dreams in the plants, and wakens in man. "He
would remain in contemplation before a flower, an insect, or a bird,
and regarded them with no dilettante or egoistic pleasure; he was
interested that the plant should have its sun, the bird its nest; that
the humblest manifestations of creative force should have the
happiness to which they are entitled.[367]" So strong was his
conviction that all living things are children of God, that he would
preach to "my little sisters the birds," and even undertook the
conversion of "the ferocious wolf of Agobio."

This tender reverence for Nature, which is a mark of all true
Platonism, is found, as we have seen, in Plotinus. It is also
prominent in the Platonists of the Renaissance, such as Bruno and
Campanella,[368] and in Petrarch, who loved to offer his evening
prayers among the moonlit mountains. Suso has at least one beautiful
passage on the sights and sounds of spring, and exclaims, "O tender
God, if Thou art so loving in Thy creatures, how fair and lovely must
Thou be in Thyself![369]" The Reformers, especially Luther and
Zwingli, are more alive than might have been expected to the value of
Nature's lessons; and the French mysti