prayeth God to sende it good lucke. In many places they make a great dyner, and kepe a feast as it were at a solemne wedding."[1]
These bell baptisms became matters of great importance. Popes, kings, and prelates were proud to stand as sponsors. During the French Revolution, four of the bells at the Cathedral of Versailles were destroyed; and on the 6th of January, 1824, four new ones were baptized, the Voltairian, King Louis XVIII, and the pious Duchess d'Angoulême standing as sponsors.
In some of these ceremonies, zeal appears to have outrun knowledge, and one of Luther's stories, at the expense of the older Church, was that certain authorities thus christened a bell "Hosanna," supposing that to be the name of a woman.
To add to the efficacy of such baptisms, water was sometimes brought from the river Jordan.[2]
The prayers used at bell baptisms fully recognize this doctrine; the ritual of Paris embraces the petition that "whensoever this bell shall sound, it shall drive away the malign influences of the assailing spirits, the horror of their apparitions, the rush of whirlwinds, the stroke of lightning, the harm of thunder, the disasters of storms, and all the spirits of the tempest."[3] Another prayer begs that "the sound of this bell may put to flight the fiery darts of the enemy of men";[4] and others vary the form but not the substance of this petition. The great Jesuit theologian, Bellarmin, did indeed try to deny the reality of this baptism; but this can only be regarded as a piece of casuistry suited to Protestant hardness of heart, or as strategy in the warfare against heretics.
Forms of baptism were laid down in various manuals sanctioned directly by papal authority, and sacramental efficacy was everywhere taken for granted.[5] The development of this idea in the older Church was too strong to be resisted;[6] but, as a rule, the Protestant theolo-
- ↑ Sleidan's "Commentaries," English translation, as above, fol. 334 (lib. xxi, sub anno 1549).
- ↑ See Montanus, as above, who cites Beck, "Lutherthum vor Luthero," p. 294, for the statement that many bells were carried to the Jordan by pilgrims for this purpose.
- ↑ See Arago, "Œuvres" (Paris, 1854), vol. iv, p. 322.
- ↑ Arago, as above.
- ↑ As has often been pointed out, the ceremony was in all its details—even to the sponsors, the wrapping a garment about the baptized, the baptismal fee, the feast—precisely the same as when a child was baptized. Magius, who is no skeptic, relates, from his own experience, an instance of this sort, where a certain bishop stood sponsor for two bells, giving them both his own name—William (see his "De Tintinnabulis," xiv).
- ↑ And no wonder, when the oracle of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, expressly pronounced church-bells, "provided they have been duly consecrated and baptized," the foremost means of "frustrating the atmospheric mischiefs of the devil," and likened steeples in which bells are ringing to a hen brooding her chickens, "for the tones of the consecrated metal repel the demons and avert storm and lightning"; when pre-Reformation preachers of such universal currency as Joannes Herolt could declare, "Bells, as all agree, are baptized with the result that they are secure from the power of Satan,
