Editorial March 3, 1986 Issue

Life is All

WILLIAM E. MOODY

The bell at Lincoln's Inn, one of the four Inns of Court in London, is normally silent. But should it peal in the early afternoon, it is announcing the death of a barrister. Upon hearing the bell, other barristers can send a clerk to learn the name of their colleague.

John Donne surely would have known of the bell's somber message. Donne, the seventeenth-century English minister and poet, had once been a law student at Lincoln's Inn, and later he delivered his sermons there for several years.

He must have thought deeply about what the bell's ringing symbolized, and he wrote these moving words in one of his devotions: "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. ... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."^{Devotions upon Emergent Occasions [1624], No. XVII .}

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