THE BELLS OF THE FIRST UNITARIAN SOCIETY IN NEWTON

Roberta Humez & James Ishmael Ford

14 April, 2002

To call the fold to church in time,
We chime.
When joy and mirth are on the wing,
We ring.
When we lament a departed soul,
We toll.

Anonymous

The history of bells is shrouded in the mists of time. If a bell is defined as anything that produces a ringing sound when struck, then bells are very ancient things indeed. Those wondrous cave paintings, our most distant ancestor’s gifts to us, give mute testimony to our human need for beauty as well as utility. Within that context these paintings, among our oldest artifacts, as they portray aspects of our ancestor’s lives, appear sometimes to represent musicians. No one will ever know when the first bell was rung.

Bells can be made of clay or wood. Some gourds make great bells. Metal bells probably date from the earliest working of metal itself. We can be certain metal bells date from the development of bronze, the most ancient alloy. Crotals, perhaps most commonly thought of as a sleigh bell, little spheres with small connected holes in the side, and a tiny ball within the sphere date with certainty from three thousand years before the common era. This was a working bell, probably mostly used to tie around the necks of animals. Of wide distribution around the world, archeologists have found more crotals than any other kind of bell.

As for many other things, our oldest records for any sophisticated use of music trace back to ancient China. Written records of musical history date to the Shang dynasty, roughly sixteen hundred years BCE And bells, if you’ll pardon the expression, played an important part in Chinese musical history. We know that three thousand years ago in Beijing a gigantic bell was struck to mark the night hours.

In the west we trace the beginning of the church bell in a blending of myth and history to Paulinus, the fourth century bishop of Nola, in Campania, Italy. Before his time, people were called to services by the clapping of sacred boards. Inspired by that line in scripture to make a joyful noise before the Lord, he had a great bronze kettle hung above the church, to be struck with a hammer announcing times for worship.

Whether this is actually history or not, the word for a large bell in Latin is campanoe, supposedly for Campania the original location of church bells; while smaller bells are named for the bishop, and called noloe. Variations on these Latin names continue in Italy and Spain. However, our English word comes from the Anglo-Saxon bellan, which means, "to bellow."

The history of church bells in our country dates from 1745. Britain and France were at war, George Washington was thirteen, Thomas Jefferson was two and Paul Revere was ten. The church wardens at Christ Church, what we now call Old North Church in Boston, commissioned their member Thomas Gunter to go to Gloucester, England, and purchase a peal (that is, a tuned set) of eight English church bells. As best we know, that was the beginning for North America.

According to the minutes of a meeting here at the First Unitarian Society in December 1910, some eleven hundred dollars had been raised for a fund to acquire a "peal of bells" for the clock tower. This kind of peal was to be four bells, which strike in varied order to mark every fifteen minutes in the hour. This is called quarter-hour chiming.

However the minutes of the Women’s Alliance from a month later, January 1911, note that the Board of Trustees decided to not go forward, believing the project was unaffordable. In response the minutes state that "incendiary speeches were made." The women of our Society would not let it end there, and took on the project. Records indicate that by 1914 the Women’s Alliance had raised three thousand dollars, and by the end of 1915, four thousand dollars, enough to purchase and hang the bells.

What we ended up with was a peal of eleven bells. There is a bronze tablet on the wall of the vestibule that commemorates the dedication of the chimes to the memory of Sarah Knapp Otis, her husband Benjamin Franklin Otis, and Helen Haynes Jaynes, the first wife of the then minister of this Society.

Please forgive some statistics. Our eleven bells range in weight from 575 pounds to 3,350 pounds. The combined weight of these bells is just shy of seven tons. The McShane foundry in Baltimore forged them. They are hung "dead" or stationary, and are rung by clappers within each bell. Although the four corner bells, as well as a fifth bell near one of the corners also have hammers that strike the outside. All together they make a Westminster Peal.

Great bells have names or mottoes. Of our bells, the largest is inscribed "My tongue shall tell of the Fatherhood of God." The second bell in size, "My voice shall prophesy of the Brotherhood of Man." The third bell, "I speak of the saving power of the good life." The fourth bell, "I proclaim the freedom of the mind to think and of the soul to worship." The fifth bell, "I testify to the supreme worth of human service." The sixth bell, "I ring out for the selfishness and meanness of men." The seventh, "I ring in the generous spirit and the blameless life." The eighth, "I sound abroad the joy at the heart of the world." The ninth, "I cry the eternal progress of mankind." The tenth, "I am the voice of Faith, Hope and Love." And the eleventh bell rings out; "I sing the valors and the excellence of the humble children of God."

I think about these inscriptions. If we allow for the masculine-by-preference language of the times, these are powerful calls to us. And while each of us may hesitate at one of these assertions or another, for instance a fair number of us probably have some qualms about that eternal progress of humankind; still, they all call and challenge us in ways that are worthy of our reflection. They ring out for us, quite possibly, a path to wisdom. Certainly it is a ringing of our ancestral faith, of the hope of the Unitarian vision.

It is worthwhile remembering they do not turn away from meanness and selfishness. They ring of our capacity for evil, while also ringing for the joy at the heart of our world. They sing the possibilities of our human condition, of our common worth and the fire of our minds, and the saving power of good lives. They ring for possibility. And if we are just a little lucky, we’ll remember that, whenever we hear them.

As a great bellowing of the human heart, as the song of our aspiration, these bells, ancient as human longing, as recent as the women who would not turn away from their acquisition for our Society; the ringing of these bells are the ringing of our deepest longing, our greatest hope. They’ve rung for us for nearly a hundred years, singing out cautions and possibilities of what we might be. May they ring out for at least a hundred years more.
Amen.