The Directory described the legalized mode of celebrating the initiatory rite of the Gospel. Private members of the Church were by that authority forbidden to perform it; its administration being lodged, it was said, in "the hands of the Stewards of the mysteries of God." Great importance was attached to the publicity of the ceremony; the law requiring it to be conducted in a place where the whole act of worship could be seen and heard, and not in a dark corner of the church, where--to use the words of the Directory--"fonts in the time of Popery were unfitly and superstitiously placed." The Presbyterians explained baptism as the seal of ingrafting into Christ--the right to which formed the inheritance of the seed of believers, who were pronounced to be "holy before baptism, and therefore are they to be baptized." The inward virtue was not tied in its communication to the time of administering the ordinance. Its fruit and power, it was said, "reacheth to the whole course of our life; and that outward baptism is not so necessary, that through the want thereof the infant is in danger of damnation, or the parents guilty, if they do not contemn or neglect the ordinance of Christ, when and where it may be had." Instruction to that effect was to be given when the service took place; then prayer was to be offered for "sanctifying the water to this spiritual use"--the element being applied by means of pouring or sprinkling.[397] The service was concluded with thanksgiving and supplication, for which suitable topics were suggested by the Directory. The staid Puritan matron, in raiment simple as it was pure, came to church accompanied by her husband--also dressed in Puritan garb--who presented the child to the minister and announced its name. Names savouring of Paganism and Popery were decidedly forbidden, and sometimes, no doubt, peculiar ones taken from Scripture were chosen; yet, in this respect, the Puritans of the Commonwealth only followed a custom which had been common in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. Any strange Christian names which might be borne by men and women under the Protectorate must have been given by a parent at that earlier period, and can therefore be no just reason for ridiculing the persons to whom they belonged. Care was taken in the ordinance which established the Directory to require that there should be a book of vellum provided for the registration of baptisms; but the unsettled condition of the times in some cases rendered the provision nugatory. For example, the Vicar of Lowestoft states that, in 1645, he and many others were taken prisoners by Colonel Cromwell, so that, for some time, there existed neither minister nor clerk in the town, and "the inhabitants were obliged to procure one another to baptize their children"--consequently baptisms could not be properly registered.[398]