These bell baptisms became matters of great importance. Popes, kings, and prelates were proud to stand as sponsors. Four of the bells at the Cathedral of Versailles having been destroyed during the French Revolution, four new ones were baptized, on the 6th of January, 1824, the Voltairean King, Louis XVIII, and the pious Duchess d'Angouleme 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.(240)
(240) 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.
The prayers used at bell baptisms fully recognise 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." 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 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.(241)
(241) For prayers at bell baptisms, see Arago, Oeuvres, Paris, 1854,
vol. iv, p. 322.
Forms of baptism were laid down in various manuals sanctioned directly by papal authority, and sacramental efficacy was everywhere taken for granted.(242) The development of this idea in the older Church was too strong to be resisted;(243) but, as a rule, the Protestant theologians of the Reformation, while admitting that storms were caused by Satan and his legions, opposed the baptism of bells, and denied the theory of their influence in dispersing storms. Luther, while never doubting that troublesome meteorological phenomena were caused by devils, regarded with contempt the idea that the demons were so childish as to be scared by the clang of bells; his theory made them altogether too powerful to be affected by means so trivial. The great English Reformers, while also accepting very generally the theory of diabolic interference in storms, reproved strongly the baptizing of bells, as the perversion of a sacrament and involving blasphemy. Bishop Hooper declared reliance upon bells to drive away tempests, futile. Bishop Pilkington, while arguing that tempests are direct instruments of God's wrath, is very severe against using "unlawful means," and among these he names "the hallowed bell"; and these opinions were very generally shared by the leading English clergy.(244)
(242) As has often been pointed out, the ceremony was in all its
details—even to the sponsors, the wrapping a garment about the
baptised, the baptismal fee, the feast—precisely the same as when a
child was baptised. Magius, who is no sceptic, relates from his own
experience an instant of this sort, where a certain bishop stood sponsor
for two bells, giving them both his own name—William. (See his De
Tintinnabulis, vol. xiv.)
(243) And no wonder, when the oracle of the Church, Thomas Aquinas,
expressly pronounced church bells, "provided they have been duly
consecrated and baptised," 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 Johannes Herolt
declared, "Bells, as all agree, are baptised with the result that they
are secure from the power of Satan, terrify the demons, compel the
powers"; when Geiler of Kaiserberg especially commended bell-ringing
as a means of beating off the devil in storms; and when a canonist
like Durandus explained the purpose of the rite to be, that "the demons
hearing the trumpets of the Eternal King, to wit, the bells, may flee
in terror, and may cease from the stirring up of tempests." See Herolt,
Sermones Discipuli, vol. xvii, and Durandus, De ritibus ecclesiae, vol.
ii, p. 12. I owe the first of these citations to Rydberg, and the others
to Montanus. For Geiler, see Dacheux, Geiler de Kaiserberg, pp. 280,
281.
(244) The baptism of bells was indeed, one of the express complaints
of the German Protestant princes at the Reformation. See their Gravam.
Cent. German. Grav., p. 51. For Hooper, see his Early Writings, p. 197
(in Parker Society Publications). For Pilkington, see his Works, p.
177 (in same). Among others sharing these opinions were Tyndale, Bishop
Ridley, Archbishop Sandys, Becon, Calfhill, and Rogers. It is to be
noted that all of these speak of the rite as "baptism."