Ancient Symbol

Ancient Symbol
Oil on canvas

"So, from the literary point of view, we may agree with St. Augustine that the ideas of the church of Christ existed for millennia before the coming of Christ himself. . . . At any rate, it demonstrably did so in China. To sum up: we have the single deity of three aspects, the ministrant spirits of the savior of mankind--divided, in this case, into the two sages. For if, to use a metaphor of Po-Chu-I from The Everlasting Wrong, we regard Confusius and Lao-Tsze as two birds each with only one wing, so that they may fly only together, we find almost exactly the reproduced figure of the Christian Savior. . ."
--Ford Madox Ford, The March of Literature (Dalkey Archive edition, p.65)