With little hope of advantage, I yet felt it a duty to consult many of the Evangelical clergymen whom I knew, and to ask how _they_ reconciled the Baptismal Service to their consciences.
I found (if I remember) three separate theories among them,--all evidently mere shifts invented to avoid the disagreeable necessity of resigning their functions.

Not one of these good people seemed to have the most remote idea that it was their duty to investigate the meaning of the formulary with the same unbiassed simplicity as if it belonged to the Gallican Church.

They did not seek to know what it was written to mean, nor what sense it must carry to every simpleminded hearer; but they solely asked, how they could manage to assign to it a sense not wholly irreconcilable with their own doctrines and preaching.

This was too obviously hollow.

The last gentleman whom I consulted, was the rector of a parish, who from week to week baptized children with the prescribed formula: but to my amazement, he told me that _he_ did not like the Service, and did not approve of Infant Baptism; to both of which things he submitted, solely because, as an inferior minister of the Church, it was his duty to obey established authority! The case was desperate.