The Tamilian Antiquary Manikka Vacagar And His Date Volume I. No. 4

About the Book:-Volume Four contains articles on Manikka Vacagar and his date and on the early Christians of Malabar. “Love great men; love, venerate and bow down in submission before them. Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him? ” These words of Carlyle come to his mind when he thinks of the sage that sang the supremely beautiful lyrics of the Tiru Vapagam. Manikka Vacagar is among the greatest of our saints who renounced the pomp and pageantry of the world to walk humbly with God. No work is held in 2 higher estimation and veneration by the Tamils than Manikka Vacagar’s “ Sacred Song”. There are few poems in Tamil devotional literature that can compare with the Tint Vacagam in light and sweetness, in grace and earnestness, in lofty feeling and fervid piety, in passionate longing for spiritual peace and purity and in the uplifting faith in divine grace in which the human soul, tossed about on the stormy billows of intellectual and moral puzzles, finds a safe haven of rest. The music of Manikka Vacagar’s melting lyrics and their glowing faith and fervour have for centuries continued to thrill with rapturous emotion the teeming millions of the Tamil country whose story of spiritual growth, of spiritual struggle and spiritual triumph, has been permanently influenced by them. To the Tamils, Manikka Vacagar has always been ‘the saint whose words are sweetest honey, capable of quenching the thirst of their yearning souls, or whose utterances are ‘precious rubies,’ forming a treasure-house full of accents of the Holy Ghost.