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மறைமலையம் LOMMLDMWWILD – 31
defies the skill of human hand to produce even a meanest but vital copy of it. Does it not bespeak the illimitable grace and unbounded love on the part of the benefactor to bestow unasked on all sentient beings such invaluable gifts as cannot be given by any but himself? Though such gifts lie beyond the scope of our earthly parents, yet what they give us with so much care, with so much love, with so much self-sacrifice must have been prompted only by the principle of universal love that dwells within every heart to make it like itself. For Divine nature is impressed on all Selves that have been brought into existence on this earth, and he who studies the nature and characteristics of his earthly parents will, as a matter of course, be led to comprehend the nature and personality of God to a real and appreciable extent. If viewed correctly in this light, how much truth is imbedded in the saying of the Holy Bible: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them." (Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 27). As a painter imprints his inward thought-picture on the picture he begets outwardly, as a sculpture chisels a statue out of a marble block in accordance with an image formed antecedently in his mind, so too the Divine mind prints its thought-forms on the pliant matter and brings out of it bodies of innumerable kinds and shapes.
As Plato said; "The pattern which works on earth is laid up in heaven." Vast as is the difference between the structure of one body and that of another, the two co-ordiante principles of male and female that underlie them all are invariably the same. Hence, God is a person of light which combines in itself the principles of male and female in their most subtle thought-form which operates as the original of all male and female forms that take shape in matter. This fact relating to the two prominent features both in the material and spiritual planes had forced themselves so much into the attention of all thinking minds among the people of bygone ages that you cannot find among them one single soul who did not worship a God and a Goddess side by side.
Now, coming to our own ancient Tamil people, we find much the same kind of conception about the Divine nature to prevail among
