Chapter 36

CHAPTER XXXVI [The Fiendish Fun of Alp-climbing]

We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas. The church-bell began to ring at
four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued
to ring I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the
invitation through his head. Most church-bells in the world are of poor
quality, and have a harsh and rasping sound which upsets the temper and
produces much sin, but the St. Nicholas bell is a good deal the worst
one that has been contrived yet, and is peculiarly maddening in its
operation. Still, it may have its right and its excuse to exist, for the
community is poor and not every citizen can afford a clock, perhaps; but
there cannot be any excuse for our church-bells at home, for their is
no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair
pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from
our steeples. There is much more profanity in America on Sunday than is
all in the other six days of the week put together, and it is of a more
bitter and malignant character than the week-day profanity, too. It is
produced by the cracked-pot clangor of the cheap church-bells.

We build our churches almost without regard to cost; we rear an edifice
which is an adornment to the town, and we gild it, and fresco it, and
mortgage it, and do everything we can think of to perfect it, and then
spoil it all by putting a bell on it which afflicts everybody who hears
it, giving some the headache, others St. Vitus's dance, and the rest the
blind staggers.

An American village at ten o'clock on a summer Sunday is the quietest
and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature; but it is a pretty
different thing half an hour later. Mr. Poe's poem of the "Bells" stands
incomplete to this day; but it is well enough that it is so, for the
public reciter or "reader" who goes around trying to imitate the sounds
of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find himself "up a
stump" when he got to the church-bell--as Joseph Addison would say. The
church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be
a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example. It is still
clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are
not useful now, neither are they ornamental. One is the bell-ringing
to remind a clock-caked town that it is church-time, and another is the
reading from the pulpit of a tedious list of "notices" which everybody
who is interested has already read in the newspaper. The clergyman even
reads the hymn through--a relic of an ancient time when hymn-books are
scarce and costly; but everybody has a hymn-book, now, and so the public
reading is no longer