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.