Lay BAPTISM, we find to have been permitted by both the Common-prayer Books of King Edward and that of Queen Elizabeth, when an infant is in immediate danger of death, and a lawful minister cannot be had. This was founded upon the mistaken notion of the impossibility of salvation without the sacrament of baptism: but afterwards, when they came to have clearer notions of the sacraments, it was unanimously resolved in a convocation, held in the year 1575, that even private baptism, in a case of necessity, was only to be administered by a lawful minister.
BAPTISM is also applied, abusively, to certain ceremonies used in giving names to things inanimate.
The ancients knew nothing of the custom of giving baptism to inanimate things, as bells, ships, and the like, by a superstitious consecration of them. The first notice we have of this is in the Capitulars of Charles the Great, where it is only mentioned to be censured: but, afterwards, it crept into the Roman offices by degrees. Baronius carries its antiquity no higher than the year 968, when the greatest bell of the church of Lateran was christened by Pope John III. At last it grew to that superstitious height, as to be thought proper to be complained of in the Centum Gravamina of the German nation, drawn up in the public diet of the empire held at Nuremberg anno 1581; where (after having described the ceremony of baptizing a bell, with godfathers, who make responses as in baptism, and give it a name, and clothe it with a new garment as Christians were used to be clothed, and all this to make it capable of driving away tempests and devils) they conclude against it, as not only a superstitious practice, but contrary to the Christian religion, and a mere seduction of the simple people.