Dr. Increase Mather, the eminent Puritan, in his work entitled “Remarkable Providences,” published at Boston, U.S.A., in 1684, has a story of an interposition in behalf of his friend Antipas Newman.
Of other instances, somewhat later, Sehon Stace, who lived in Warding in 1707 (“Suss. Arch. Coll.,” xii. 254), commemorates the King of the Amorites, Milcom Groat (“Cal. St. P.,” 1660) representing on English soil “the abomination of the children of Ammon.” Dr. Pusey and Mr. Spurgeon might be excused a little astonishment at such a conversion by baptism.
Barrabas cannot be considered a happy choice:
“Buried, 1713, Oct. 18, Barabas, sonne of Barabas Bowen.”—All-Hallows, Barking.
Mr. Maskell draws attention to the name in his history of that church. There is something so emphatic about “now Barrabas was a robber,” that thoughts of theft seem proper to the very name. We should have locked up the spoons, we feel sure, had father or son called upon us. The father who called his son “Judas-not-Iscariot” scarcely cleared the name of its evil associations, nor would it quite meet the difficulty suggested by the remark in “Tristram Shandy:”
“Your Billy, sir—would you for the world have called him Judas?... Would you, sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name of your child, and offered you his purse along with it—would you have consented to such a desecration of him?”
We have all heard the story of Beelzebub. If the child had been inadvertently so baptized, a remedy might have been found in former days by changing the name at confirmation. Until 1552, the bishop confirmed by name. Archbishop Peccham laid down a rule:
“The minister shall take care not to permit wanton names, which being pronounced do sound to lasciviousness, to be given to children baptized, especially of the female sex: and if otherwise it be done, the same shall be changed by the bishop at confirmation.”
That this law had been carelessly followed after the Reformation is clear, else Venus Levat, already quoted, would not have been married in 1631 under that name. Certainly Dinah and Tamar come under the ban of this injunction.
Curiously enough, the change of name was sanctioned in the case of orthodox names, for Lord Coke says—