ish 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.
1