At the beginning of the eighteenth century baptisms during time of public service were decidedly unfrequent.  There had been at one time such great and widely-spread scruples at the sign of the cross and the use of sponsors, that many people had preferred, where they found it possible, to get their children baptized at home, that these adjuncts of the rite might be dispensed with.  During the Commonwealth, so long as the public ceremonial of the Church of England was prohibited, private baptism had become a custom even among those churchmen who were most attached to the Anglican ritual.  Such, thought Sherlock, were the principal causes of a neglect which seems to have become in his time almost universal.[1220] Often the form for public baptism was used on such occasions.  But this irregularity was not the worst.  There can be no doubt that these ‘home christenings’ had got to be very commonly looked upon as little more than an idle ceremony, and an occasion for jollity and tippling.  This flagrant abuse could not fail to shock the minds of earnest men.  We find Sherlock,[1221] Bull,[1222] Atterbury,[1223] Stanhope,[1224] Berriman,[1225] Secker,[1226] and a number of other Churchmen, using their best endeavours to bring about a more seemly reverence for the holy ordinance.

The taking of fees for baptism was a scandal not to be excused on any ground of prescription.  This appears to have been not very unusual, and to have been done without shame and without rebuke.[1227] Probably it chiefly grew out of the above-mentioned habit of having this sacrament celebrated privately in houses.

Early in the century the sign of the cross in baptism was still looked upon by many with great suspicion.  Even in 1773 Dean Tucker speaks of it[1228] as one of the two principal charges—­the other being that of kneeling at the Eucharist—­made by Dissenters against the established ritual.  Objections to the use of sponsors were not so often heard.  They would have been fewer still if there had been many Robert Nelsons.  His letters to his godson, a young man just setting out to a merchant’s office in Smyrna,[1229] are models of sound advice given by a wise, Christian-hearted man of the world.  Wesley thought the office a good and expedient one; but regretted, as many other Churchmen before and since have done, the form in which some of the questions are put.[1230]

In the latter part of the seventeenth and through the earlier years of the eighteenth century, we find earnest Churchmen of all opinions sorely lamenting the comparative disuse of the old custom of catechizing on Sunday afternoons.  Five successive archbishops of Canterbury—­Sheldon, Sancroft, Tillotson, Tenison, and Wake—­however widely their opinions might differ on some points relating to the edification of the Church, were cordially agreed in this.[1231] Sherlock, Kettlewell, Bull, Beveridge, Sharp, Fleetwood may be mentioned as others who, both by precept and example, insisted upon its importance.  After Bishop