The compelling cause to the confessions referred to was therefore the parents' desire to secure baptism for their offspring during a period when baptism was believed to be essential to salvation, with the Calvinistic hell as an alternative. The constant and not infrequently cruel use made by the church and the clergy of the parental fear of infant damnation--the belief "that Millions of Infants are tortured in Hell to all Eternity for a Sin that was committed thousands of Years before they were born"--is matter of common knowledge. Not only did it compel young married men and women to shameful public confessions of the kind which has been described, but it was at times arbitrarily used by some ministers in a way which is at once ludicrous and, now, hard to understand. Certain of them, for instance, refused to baptize infants born on the Sabbath, there being an ancient superstition to the effect that a child born on the Sabbath was also conceived on the Sabbath; a superstition presumably the basis on which was founded the provision of the apocryphal Blue Laws of Connecticut,-- "Whose rule the nuptial kiss restrains On Sabbath day, in legal chains";[8] and there is one well-authenticated case of a Massachusetts clergyman whose practice it was thus to refuse to baptize Sabbath-born babes, who in passage of time had twins born to him on a Lord's day. He publicly confessed his error, and in due time administered the rite to his children.[9] With the church refusing baptism on the one side, and with an eternity of torment for unbaptized infants on the other, some definite line had to be drawn. This was effected through what was known as "the seven months' rule"; and the penalty for its violation, enforced and made effective by the refusal of the rites of baptism, was a public confession. Under the operation of "the seven months' rule" the records of the Groton church show that out of two hundred persons owning the baptismal covenant in that church during the fourteen years between 1761 and 1775 no less than sixty-six confessed to fornication before marriage.[10] The entries recording these cases are very singular. At first the full name of the person, or persons in the case of husband and wife, is written, followed by the words "confessed and restored" in full. Somewhat later, about the year 1763, the record becomes regularly "Confessed Fornication;" which two years later is reduced to "Con. For.;" which is subsequently still further abbreviated into merely "C. F." During the three years 1789, 1790 and 1791 sixteen couples were admitted to full communion; and of these nine had the letters "C. F." inscribed after their names in the church records. I also find the following in regard to this church usage in Worthington's "History of Dedham" (pp. 108, 109), further indicating that the Groton and Braintree records reveal no exceptional condition of affairs:--