“...the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they…It is through their show, not their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it – just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work…So Nature as well exists primarily for her face, her look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man’s farther use.”
“Human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to Him, and is always leaving Him – His intent, that is, His perfected work – behind it, always going farther and farther away from the point where His work culminates in revelation. “[Emphasis added]
“What notion should we have of the unchanging and unchangeable, without the solidity of matter?… How should we imagine what we may of God without the firmament over our heads, a visible sphere, yet a formless infinitude? What idea of God could we have without the sky?”
“The truth of a flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk – the compeller of smile and tear…The idea of God is the flower: His idea is not the botany of the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means – of canvas and colour and brush in relation to the picture in the painter’s brain.”
“The truth of a thing, then is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man’s imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing.” [Second emphasis added]
(All these readings can be found in C.S. Lewis’ book George MacDonald: An Anthology)
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