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PREFACE
The religious and philosophical matter that appears in the following pages form the substance of my presidential speech de- livered on the 15th October, 1927, at the 42nd annual meetingof the Saiva Siddhanta Sabha at Trichi Rock Fort. What was briefly treated in the course of the delivery is now expanded into its full final form; and to a few Puranic legends then quoted to illustrate the degener- ated notions about God and religion, some more are now added to make the treatment of the subject complete within its bounds. The object of this little book is to disclose the vast difference that lies between the ancient form of Saiva religion and its modern form.
In very ancient times the theoretical side of Saivism had been purely philosophical. while its practical side/ which consisted in bringing into an intimate relation of love the human and the Divine selves, tended to a worship of luminous bodies such as the Sun and the Moon and also fire which constitutes the essence of all bright objects. God was conceived to be a subtle spiritual light which manifests itself in the chief physical luminary the Sun, so that all rites, religious observances, and original myths in Saivism clung around this resplendent body. For us who have come to think of the appearances of the sun and the moon as so many natural occur- rences that uniformly take place in the realm of dead matter, they have lost their high purpose and significance. But to our ancestors who lived in close relationship with Nature, they had been a great wonder, and to their then more clear, vivid, quick and penetrating intuitive sense they revealed the gracious presence of a loving heav- enly Father. What they preceived by means of their intuiton, and what they loved so ardently in the manifestation of light, had not been a mere figment of their imagination, but a reality informed
