The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view, _John 8:41-44_—“_If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil_” = the Fatherhood of God is not universal; _Mat. 5:44, 45_—“_Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven_”; _John 1:12_—“_as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name._” Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to ‘_another gospel_’ (_Gal. 1:7_), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an ‘_anathema_’ (_Gal 1:8._)”