Similarly, Lewis was inspired by the gentle and frank Thomas Traherne, whose Centuries called (in a phrase that echoes Lewis’s “just sentiments”) for a “rendering to things their due esteem”30—that is, not just an understanding of the natural world but also a love and worshipful reverence for it. Traherne makes the argument that the greatest gift given to humankind is the natural world, and the appropriate way to receive it is, first, to study it, but then to wonder at it, to treasure it within, until you come to revere it: “The World is unknown, till the Value and Glory of it is seen: till
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