Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 193, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1915 — “GOD, THE FATHER” [ARTICLE]

“GOD, THE FATHER”

Words of Scripture Convey Message of Truth to AU Who Will Read and Heed. Science shows us that all souls are alike. It has studied millions of souls in every part of the earth and it finds them exactly the same in their faculties of knowledge, feeling and willing. Men may differ in color, In language. In size, in ability, but they don’t differ as men. If one of them came from a certain original source, all of them must have come from the same original source, which proves that the Father of souls is the Father of all souls, and therefore the All-Father or the Universal Father. Science also shows that all souls are going through the same discipline. No matter where we travel, we will find sin and sorrow, light and dark' ness, pain and hardship, and all the other things that try men’s souls and turn them out rugged and divine in character. This being so, does it not prove that God takes an interest, and the same kind of an interest, in all men? He is doing for all exactly what he is doing for each, and be is doing for each exactly what he is doing for all. This is another proof of his universal Fatherhood and a display of his partiality and favoritism. Science will allow no religious sect to monopolize * God, any more than it will allow one part of the world to monopolize gravitation. Gravitation is a universal law —everywhere found and everywhere alike. God is a universal Father, everywhere present and everywhere alike. Father of All Mankind. When we take the great-visioned characters of the Bible —Jesus and Paul —we find them united in believing God to be the Father of all mankind. Hear Jesus: “When ye pray say, Our Father.” The “our" is an inclusive and not an exclusive pronoun. Jesus authorized and made it possible for every human being in this world to lift up his voice and say: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” Hear St. Paul. He Is speaking to the Greeks at Athens. They are not yet converted to Christianity, so that it cannot be replied that he is speaking to Christian Greeks. He says: "God that made the world and all things therein. . . . hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth. . . - In him we live and move and have our being; as certain of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.” There you have the doctrine of the universal Parenthood of God from Christ’s chief apostle and the greatest Christian preacher and missionary the world has ever known. It it hard for some people to come to this. They are as strangely determined not to believe it as was Simon Peter. But he had to come to it and so will they. God sent Peter a dream, a kind of heavenly parable, in., which he told him to eat certain things that Peter, as a Jew, had always thought he had no religious right to eat. He thought that they were unclean and were condemned by God himself. But God told him to eat them. In other words, he commanded him to broaden out and to see that what God had cleansed could not be unclean, and also to see that no one whom God had created could be alien to God and should not be alien to him. Peter opened his eyes and said: “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to him." (Acts 10:34.) You and I and everyone in Christendom and in the rest of the world should wake up and see and know and believe in the universal Fatherhood of God. For this is the latest and highest discovery the soul has made concerning God, the grandest discovery It can possibly make. He is not only a Father, but a world-wide Father. True Christianity. Christianity, as Christ taught it, is the only religion in the world that proclaims the universal Fatherhood of God, and is therefore the only religion that can bring about the universal brotherhood of man. If you do not believe this doctrine, you have stopped short in your search for a Father, and have got a Father who is altogether too small and too provincial in influence to save the multitudinous inhabitants of this globe. He must be an All-Father, to save all. And this is the purpose and program dear to his heart, if I read the Bible aright and science aright. The Bibie says “that in the name of Jesus Chpst every knee should bow, of things, in, heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ Is Lord, to the glory of God, the Father.” (PhiL 2:10, 22.) One God. one law. one element And one far-off Divine ®y ent - To which the whole creation moves.