Have thoughts and associations like these no demoralizing influence? How
can parents admonish their children against novel reading after they have
taken their names from novels? The giving of Christian names at the present
time is indeed a ridiculous farce, an insult to christianity, and a
representation of stoical infidelity before the baptismal altar. It is
there an act of the Babylonish king to heathenize the child. We might
almost say that the folly has become a rage. The rage for new names
especially,--names which do not adorn the sacred page, nor carry us back to
the times and faith of our fathers, but which have gained notoriety in the
world of fiction, and associate us with the lover's affrays and with the
desperado's feats,--these are the names which Christian parents too often
seek with avidity for their children. If you were to judge their homes by
these names, you would think yourself in a Turkish seraglio, or amid the
voluptuous scenes of a Parisian court, or in the bosom of a heathen
family. What, for instance, is there about such names as Nero, Caesar,
Pompey, Punch, that would remind you that you were in a Christian home?
It is often disgusting, too, to see how some Christian parents, who live in
humble life, seek to ape, in their children, the empty sounding titles of
the world. They only show their vanity and weakness, and often bring
ridicule upon their children; for--
"To lend the low-born noble names, is to shed upon them ridicule
and evil;
Yea, many weeds run rank in pride, if men have dubbed them cedars,
And to herald common mediocrity with the noisy notes of fame,
Tendeth to its deeper scorn, as if it were to call the mole a mammoth.
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