Not only was the Church more strict in this matter in Scotland than in
England, but the nature of the sponsion was different. In Knox's Liturgy,
the sponsors are not regarded as proxies for the child, but are required
to make a declaration of their own faith, in which they engage to instruct
the child. As the matter is well put by Dr Hill, "the parents do not make
any promise for the child, but they promise for themselves that nothing
shall be wanting, on their part, to engage the child to undertake, at some
future time, that obligation which he cannot then understand."
In the latter half of the seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth
century, the Kirk Sessions had as much to do in repressing undue
gatherings at the font as on the occasion of wedding festivities. In 1622
the Kirk Session of Aberdeen, considering "that it is come in custom that
every base servile man in the town, when he has a bairn to be baptised,
invites twelve or sixteen persons to be his gossips and god-fathers to his
bairn," whereas the old custom was not to invite more than two, ordered
that in future only two or at most four persons should be allowed to
appear in that capacity. In 1681 an Act of Parliament prohibited the
attendance at baptisms of more than four witnesses, in addition to parents
and children, brothers and sisters; and in 1720 the Kirk Session of
Kilmarnock made an ordinance that "only so many women as are necessary
attend infants that are carried to the church to be baptised, and the
Session think three sufficient."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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