,
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 Engl