Eutaxian Humor

Today's Friday Funny comes from a book that revolutionized the American Presbyterian church in the 19th century. Charles W. Baird -- who, like his brother, Henry M. Baird, was a Huguenot historian of note -- published Eutaxia, or the Presbyterian Liturgies: Historical Sketches in 1855. It was successful in moving American Presbyterians away from the form of worship sketched by the Westminster Assembly's Directory of Public Worship and towards liturgical forms of worship more akin to Anglicanism. In fact, James W. Alexander had this to say about this book in a letter dated June 13, 1855: 'If the Eutaxian Liturgy come into actuality, the only result will be to train people for the "Common Prayer"' (Forty Years' Familiar Letters of James W. Alexander, D. D., Constituting, with the Notes, a Memoir of His Life (1860), p. 208).

Be that as it may, one particular anecdote provided by Baird in this book (pp. 83-84) strikes the funny bone.

We may be allowed to vary these souvenirs by adducing one of the more lively cast. It is connected with the baptismal service. When the famous [Jean] Claude was pastor of the church at Charenton, near Paris (about the middle of the seventeenth century), he was called on one occasion to perform the marriage ceremony between two Huguenots in high life; of whom the bridegroom was a decrepit septuagenerian, leading to the altar a young girl of some sixteen summers. As the minister saw this ill-matched couple advancing up the aisle to meet him, whether by accident or design we cannot say, he opened his book to the baptismal form, and addressed the disconcerted bridegroom with the interrogation: "Dost thou here present this child to be baptized?"