We have given up announcing the miracle of transubstantiation or putting to flight storms and demons or managing exorcism by bell, book and candle, but bells as sweet as the Angelus still ring over our English fields and woodlands on Sunday. The passing-bell in a country churchyard is full of pathos and memory, breaking the stillness and arresting for a moment the busy hay-makers as they pause to listen, and remember some old comrade who will no more be seen in their ranks. The solemn bell at our midnight services, now so customary on the last evening in each year throughout the land, is also charged with hallowed thoughts; indeed, I know few things more thrilling than that watch-night bell, which seems as the crowd kneels within to beat away on its waves of sound the hopes and fears, and tumultuous passions of the dead year when its echoes have ceased those kneeling crowds feel that one more chapter in the book of life has been written, that ringing voice has sealed the troubled past and heralded in with its iron, inexorable, tho trembling lips the unknown future. What with the dinner-bell, safety yard bell, school, factory and jail bells, small cupola spring-bells, safety electric bells, not to forget baby’s coral and bells, bell-rattles, last reminiscence of the extinct fool’s cap and bells, and fool’s wand, with its crown of jingling baubles, we seem never to hear the last of bells. Bells are the landmarks of history as well as the daily ministers to our religious and secular life. The bell’s tongue is impartial and passionless as fate. It tolls for the king’s death “Le roi est mort.” It rings in his successor, “Vive le roi.” The cynical bells rang out as Henry VIII led wife after wife to the altar, the loyal bells rang out for the birth of Charles I, and the disloyal ones tolled again for his execution. The bells of Chester rang a peal for Trafalgar, alternated with a deep toll for the death of Nelson, and some of us can remember the tolling of St. Paul’s bell as the Iron Duke’s funeral passed up Ludgate Hill. The long green bell which announced to the Pisans that the wretched Ugolino, starved to death in the bottom dungeon, had at length ceased to breathe, still hangs in the famous leaning tower of Pisa.
At the ringing of the Sicilian Vespers in the Easter of 1282, 8,000 French were massacred in cold blood by John of Procida. The midnight bells of Paris gave the sign for the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24, 1471, when 100,000 persons are said to have perished. The great towers of Christendom have all their eloquent bell tongues, and as we pass in imagination from one to the other we not only catch the mingled refrain of life and death as it floats upward from the fleeting generations of men, but we may literally from those lofty summits contemplate all the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them.—H. R. Haweis, English Illustrated Magazine.
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Benefaction in Kind—See [Conditions Suggest Courses].
BENEFACTION OF ANESTHETICS
A fine sculpture in the Boston Public Garden is a marble group representing the Good Samaritan helping the man who had fallen among thieves. But more beautiful than the fine work of the sculptor is the inscription showing how the monument was erected to commemorate the earliest use of anesthetics in surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, with these texts from Scripture appended:
“Neither shall there be any more pain.”
“This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working.”—Franklin Noble, “Sermons in Illustration.”
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BENEFIT, COMPULSORY