Christian baptism suggests Christian names.  This introduces us to an important topic, viz., the kind of names Christian parents should give to their children at their baptism.  Baptismal names are indeed an important item of the Christian home.  Much more depends upon them than we are at first sight of the subject, disposed to grant.

Christianity eminently includes the great law of correspondence between its inward spirit and its outward form.  Its form and contents cannot be separated.  The principle of fitness, it everywhere exhibits; and hence its nomenclature is the herald of its spirit and truth.  The names that religion has given to her followers signify some principle of association between them.  They were adopted to designate some fact in the history of the individual, or in his relation to the church.  Hence the names adopted for the children of the Christian home should be the utterance of some fact or calling which belongs to that home.  Their name is one of the first things which children know, and hence it makes a deep impression upon them.  And as our Christian names are given to us at the time of our baptism, one would think that there is always a correspondence between the name and some fact or interest connected with the occasion.  We should then receive a Christian name, a name which does not bind us by the laws of association to what is evil either in the past or the present, but which indicates a relation to some precious boon involved in the dedication of the child to God.

Is this always so?  By no means.  It once was.  It was so in the Hebrew home and in the families of the apostolic age.  But in this day of parental rage after new-fangled things and names, taken from works of fiction and novels of doubtful character, we find that parents care but very little about the baptismal name being the herald of a religious fact.  “What is in a name?” was a question propounded by a poet.  His answer was “nothing!”

              “That which we call a rose
  By any other name would smell as sweet.”

The principle here evolved is false.  There is much in a name; and at the creation names were not mechanically given to things; but there was a vital correspondence between the name and the thing named.  Much depends upon the name.  It exerts a potent influence for good, or for evil upon the bearer and upon all around him.

Primarily, a name supposed some correspondence between its meaning and the person who bore it.  Hence the name should not be arbitrary in its application, but should “link its fitness to idea,” and with the person, run in parallel courses.

  “For mind is apt and quick to wed ideas and names together,
  Nor stoppeth its perceptions to be curious of priorities.”