Page:Kali the Mother.djvu/13

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Our daily life creates our symbol of God.

To the Arab of the desert, with his patriarchal customs, the father of the family,—just and calm in his judgments, protector of his kindred, loving to those who played about his knees as babes,—may well stand as the type of all in which men feel security.

Naturally, then, it was the Semitic mind that flashed across the dim communing of the soul with the Eternal, the rapturous illumination of the great word "Father."

God our father,—bound even to the most erring of His children by a kinship that misdoing cannot break (for if the human tie be indissoluble, shall the divine be less so?); father,—by a tie so intimate that to this day the stalwart Afghan, prostrating in the mosque, says "Thee" and "Thou" to the God of Hosts, as might an infant on its father's knee!

In the Aryan home, woman stands supreme. As wife in the West,—lady and queen of her husband—as mother in the East,—a goddess

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