[474:3] Comment. in "Epist. ad Roman," lib. v. Opera, iv. 565.
[475:1] "De Baptismo," c. 18.
[475:2] Acts ii. 41.
[475:3] Acts viii. 37, 38; xvi. 31-33.
[476:1] "Parents were commonly sponsors for their own children … and the extraordinary cases in which they were presented by others, were commonly such cases, where the parent could not, or would not, do that kind office for them; as when slaves were presented to baptism by their masters, or children whose parents were dead, were brought, by the charity of any who would shew mercy on them; or children exposed by their parents, which were sometimes taken up by the holy virgins of the Church, and by them presented unto baptism. These are the only cases mentioned by St Austin in which children seem to have had other sponsors."—Bingham, iii. 552.
[476:2] Mark x. 14.
[476:3] Compare Mark x. 13-16 with Luke xviii. 15, 16.
[477:1] See Acts xvi. 15.
[477:2] "De Baptismo," c. viii. xvi.
[477:3] "It would be thought by many a cruelty to place a person without his own consent, and in unconscious infancy, in a situation, so far, much more disadvantageous than that of those brought up pagans, that if he did ever—suppose at the age of fifteen or twenty—fall into any sin, he must remain for the rest of his life—perhaps for above half a century—deprived of all hope, or at least of all confident hope, of restoration to the divine favour; shut out from all that cheering prospect which, if his baptism in infancy had been omitted, might have lain before him."—Archbishop Whately's Scripture Doctrine concerning the Sacraments, p. 11, note.