Treatise on the Love of God By St. Francis de Sales
http://www.catholictreasury.info/books/on_love_of_God/lg66.phpBook IV. Of The Decay And Ruin Of Charity. Ch 8. An Exhortation To The Amorous Submission Which We Owe To The Decrees Of Divine Providence.
Let us believe then that as God is the maker and father of all things, so he takes care of all things by his providence, which embraces and sustains all the machine of creatures.
On the Trinity (Book XI) by St. Hilary of Poitiers
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/330211.htm16. By assuming flesh, however, He [Christ] acquired our nature in our totality, and became all that we are, but did not lose that which He was before. Both before by His heavenly origin, and now by His earthly constitution, God is His Father. By His earthly constitution God is His Father, since all things are from God the Father, and God is Father to all things, since from Him and in Him are all things. But to the Only-begotten God, God is Father, not only because the Word became flesh; His Fatherhood extends also to Him Who was, as God the Word, with God in the beginning. Thus, when the Word became flesh, God was His Father both by the birth of God the Word, and by the constitution of His flesh: for God is the Father of all flesh, though not in the same way that He is Father to God the Word. (. . .)
The Christian Sanctified By The Lord's Prayer by Jean Nicolas Grou
CHAPTER I. OUR FATHER.
https://archive.org/details/TheChristianSanctified/page/n25(. . .) Is He not indeed our Father? From Him we have our being: our souls and bodies, with all their varied qualities, are from Him. He has made us exactly as it has pleased Him, by a perfectly free volition; and having no need of us, being infinitely happy in Himself, yet by His great goodness He preserves us every moment. Our life is a continual gift of His beneficence; and, if He should withdraw His sustaining hand for one instant, we should fall into the nothingness from which He drew us. Can we doubt it, we who are not able to promise ourselves one moment of existence? How, then, should we not love, how should we not fear to offend, the Author and Preserver of our being, who has not only made us for His glory, but has rendered us capable of promoting it? He has not only given us life, but He sustains it and supplies every need. The whole universe exists for us only, and is designed for our service. Every thing which renders this earth an agreeable abode, every pleasure we enjoy, is a gift from His hand. He permits us to use all, but requires that we should do so according to His revealed will and with the gratitude which is his due. Ungrateful and rebellious children that we are, how dare we turn against our Father His own blessings, forgetting Him, abandoning Him for the vile creatures of earth, and grieving Him by our evil ways? Thou didst foresee this, O God, yet Thou hast never ceased the outpouring of Thy bounty. What earthly father would have acted like this? It is this excess of Thy goodness that renders me the more guilty. Shall I still continue thus, notwithstanding the reproaches of my conscience, Thy voice within me? Ah! take back Thy gifts, take away even my life, rather than that I should still offend Thee. Thou art my Father by creation, and much more my Father by grace.
Catechetical Lecture 7 by St. Cyril of Jerusalem
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310107.htm10. Thus much then at present, in the way of a digression, to put you in remembrance. Let me, however, add yet another testimony in proof that God is called the Father of men in an improper sense. For when in Esaias God is addressed thus, For You are our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us Isaiah 63:16, and Sarah travailed not with us , need we inquire further on this point? And if the Psalmist says, Let them be troubled from His countenance, the Father of the fatherless, and Judge of the widows , is it not manifest to all, that when God is called the Father of orphans who have lately lost their own fathers, He is so named not as begetting them of Himself, but as caring for them and shielding them. But whereas God, as we have said, is in an improper sense the Father of men, of Christ alone He is the Father by nature, not by adoption: and the Father of men in time, but of Christ before all time, as He says, And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Your own self, with the glory which I had with You before the world was John 17:5 .
11. We believe then In One God the Father the Unsearchable and Ineffable, Whom no man has seen 1 Timothy 2:16, but the Only-begotten alone has declared Him. John 1:18 For He which is of God, He has seen God : whose face the Angels do always behold in heaven Matthew 18:10, behold, however, each according to the measure of his own rank. But the undimmed vision of the Father is reserved in its purity for the Son with the Holy Ghost.
12. Having reached this point of my discourse, and being reminded of the passages just before mentioned, in which God was addressed as the Father of men, I am greatly amazed at men's insensibility. For God with unspeakable loving-kindness deigned to be called the Father of men — He in heaven, they on earth — and He the Maker of Eternity, they made in time — He who holds the earth in the hollow of His hand, they upon the earth as grasshoppers. Yet man forsook his heavenly Father, and said to the stock, You are my father, and to the stone, You have begotten me. Jeremiah 2:27 And for this reason, methinks, the Psalmist says to mankind, Forget also your own people, and your father's house , whom you have chosen for a father, whom you have drawn upon yourself to your destruction.
13. And not only stocks and stones, but even Satan himself, the destroyer of souls, have some ere now chosen for a father; to whom the Lord said as a rebuke, You do the deeds of your father John 8:41, that is of the devil, he being the father of men not by nature, but by fraud. For like as Paul by his godly teaching came to be called the father of the Corinthians, so the devil is called the father of those who of their own will consent unto him.