460 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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." * 



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'Angouleme standing as sponsors. 



In some of these ceremonies, zeal appears to have outrun knowl- 

 edge, and one of Luther's stories, at the expense of the older Church, 

 was that certain authorities thus christened a bell " Hosanna," suppos- 

 ing that to be the name of a woman. 



To add to the efficacy of such baptisms, water was sometimes 

 brought from the river Jordan. f 



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." J Another prayer begs that "the 

 sound of this bell may put to flight the fiery darts of the enemy of 

 men " ; # and others vary the form but not the substance of this pe- 

 tition. 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. || The development of this idea in the older Church 

 was too strong to be resisted ; A but, as a rule, the Protestant theolo- 



* Sleidan's " Commentaries," English translation, as above, fol. 334 (lib. xxi, sub 

 anno 1549). 



f 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. 

 X See Arago, " CEuvres " (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 pre- 

 cisely 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). 



A And no wonder, when the oracle of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, expressly pro- 

 nounced 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-Reforma- 

 tion 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, 





