Adam, our father and our head

The English hymn "Adam, our father and our head" was written by the foundational hymnwriter Isaac Watts. The text functions as a theological exploration of the Fall of Man and the resulting doctrine of original sin.

The complete poem first appeared in Watts's early collection, Horae Lyricae: Poems, Chiefly of the Lyric Kind, in 1706. In this initial volume, the text was structured in 13 stanzas of 4 lines and bore the definitive title "Jesus the only Saviour." The original 13-stanza composition proved too long for standard liturgical singing, and its use as a complete hymn remains entirely unknown in congregational history.

The Rippon Cento

The text entered common church use exclusively in an abbreviated format. Dr. John Rippon selected five specific stanzas to create a functional cento for his influential Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors, Intended to Be an Appendix to Dr. Watts's Psalms and Hymns (1787).

Cataloged as entry Number 38 in the Baptist Selection, Rippon's arrangement was compiled by extracting stanzas one, two, four, five, and seven from the original 1706 text. This specific 5-stanza version passed into common use across several early nineteenth-century evangelical collections, though it maintained a highly limited circulation in later hymnals.