Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord’s Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said: “My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord’s Prayer, I must teach them to say: ‘Our father who art in hell’; for they are only children of the devil.” Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God’s universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God’s fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God’s universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God’s Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
(_a_) The Scriptures teach that the whole human race is descended from a single pair.
_Gen. 1:27, 28_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it_”; _2:7_—“_And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul_”; _22_—“_and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man_”; _3:20_—“_And the man called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living_” = even Eve is traced back to Adam; _9:19_—“_These three were the sons of Noah; and of these was the whole earth overspread._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 110—“Logically, it seems easier to account for the divergence of what was at first one, than for the union of what was at first heterogeneous.”