Quest. XLIX. May one offer his child to be baptized, with the sign of the cross, or the use of chrism, the white garment, milk and honey, or exorcism, as among the Lutherans, who taketh these to be unlawful things?

Answ. I am not now to meddle with the question, whether they be lawful? but to this question I answer,

1. He that judgeth them unlawful, must first do his best to be certain whether they be so or not.

2. If so, he must never approve of them, or consent to them.

3. He must not offer his child to be so baptized, when, cæteris paribus, he may have it done in a better manner on lawful terms.

4. But when he cannot lawfully have better, he may and must offer his child to them that will so baptize him, rather than to worse, or none at all: because baptism is God’s ordinance and his privilege, and the sin is the minister’s, and not his. Another man’s sinful mode will not justify the neglect of our duty; else we might not join in any prayer or sacrament in which the minister modally sinneth; that is, with none.

5. The milk and honey, white garment and chrism, are so ancient (called by Epiphanius and others the traditions and customs of the universal church) that the original of them is not known. And he that then would not be so baptized, must not have been baptized at all.

6. But in this case he that bringeth his child to baptism, should make known, that it is baptism only that he desireth; and that he disowneth and disalloweth the manner which he accounteth sinful: and then he is no consenter to it.

7. But where law, scandal, or great inconveniences forbid him, he is not to make this profession openly in the congregation, but in that prudent manner which beseemeth a sober, peaceable person; whether to the minister in private, or to his neighbours in converse; it being easy among neighbours to make known a man’s dissent, without a disorderly troubling of the church, or violating the laws of obedience, civility, and peace.

8. But he must not, 1. Either offer his child to baptism, where the ordinance is essentially corrupted, or worse than none. 2. Or where he cannot be admitted without an actual sin of his own; as by false professions, subscriptions, &c. For we must not do evil for good ends.