“We all know, of course, that there is nothing frightens the devil like the ringing of bells,” said he.
“That is quite plausible,” said I. “Any one who doubts it must have lived all his life in a heathen place where there are no churches. Juan Fernandez, for example,” I added, as a couple of lines sang through my recollection. “Cowper made his Alexander Selkirk long for 'the sound of the churchgoing bell.'”
“That was a good touch of Cowper's,” said Friswell. “He knew that Alexander Selkirk was a Scotsman, and with much of the traditional sanctimoniousness of his people, when he found himself awful bad or muckle bad or whatever the right phrase is, he was ready to propitiate heaven by a pious aspiration.”
“Nothing of the sort,” cried Dorothy. “He was quite sincere. Cowper knew that there is nothing that brings back recollections of childhood, which we always think was the happiest time of our life, like the chiming of church bells.”
“I dare say you are right,” said he, after a little pause. “But like many other people, poet Cowper did not think of the church bells except in regard to their secondary function of summoning people to the sacred precincts. He probably never knew that the original use of the bells was to scare away the Evil One. It was only when they found out that he had never any temptation to enter a church, that the authorities turned their devil-scaring bells to the summoning of the worshippers, and they have kept up the foolish practice ever since.”
“Why foolish?” asked Dorothy quite affably. “You don't consider it foolish to ring a bell to go to dinner, and why should you think it so in the matter of going to church?”
“My dear creature, you don't keep ringing your dinner bell for half an hour, with an extra five minutes for the cook.”
“No,” said she quickly. “And why not? Because people don't need any urging to come to dinner, but they require a good deal to go to church, and then they don't go.”
“There's something in that,” said he. “Anyhow they've been ringing those summoning bells so long that I'm sure they will go on with them until all the churches are turned into school-houses.”
“And then there will be a passing-bell rung for the passing of the churches themselves—I suppose the origin of the passing-bell was the necessity to scare away the devil at the supreme moment,” remarked Heywood.