think that the English would not perform that part of the treaty which bound then to evacuate Jellalabad and the other garrisons; that the safe arrival of so large a force at Jellalabad would only enable them to reconquer the country in spring. The savage and uncontrolled tribes of the Passes afforded the easy means of destroying the retreating force, and he deliberately permitted them to do so. It was a crime not to be defended on any pretence of patriotism. Yet the massacre of Jaffa, for which there was less excuse, has not destroyed the French adoration for Napoleon. Blacker treachery for the same purpose has not prevented the Germans from making a national hero of Arminius. Among those who have founded, or extended, empires in the East, there are few whose lives are free from similar or worse stains. The Mahratta hero, Sevajee, would have done it; Aurungzebe would have done it; or, to come to those with whom we have ourselves been connected, Tippoo, or Hyder, would have done it.

Strong contrasts of good and evil may be expected in the characters of half-civilized men; and there are few contrasts more striking than those presented by the pages of Lieutenant Eyre's book. The man who could plot the treacherous slaughter of an army, while that very slaughter is going on, receives the individuals who are thrown into his hands with hospitable and, apparently, unaffected kindness. Lieutenant Melville is brought in wounded, and Mahomed Akbar "dressed his wounds with his own hands, applying burnt rags, and paid him every attention." The captives and their guards have to swim a river, and Akbar "manifested the greatest anxiety until all had crossed in safety." His conduct to them throughout, excepting occasional bursts of passion, appears to have been of the same character. Among civilized states very few prisoners of war are, with reference to the means of their captors, treated nearly as well as the English prisoners under the care of Akbar Khan. Compare this, again, with the conduct of other Oriental sovereigns; with the horrible cruelty shown towards their European captives by Hyder or Tippoo.

All this, it may be said, sprang from a politic intention to secure some title to our consideration; and we do not doubt that policy had its share in the kind treatment of his captives by Mahomed Akbar. There is, however, every appearance that his judgment was seconded by his natural inclination. Nor in the spectacle of the same man deliberately devoting many thousands to slaughter for a great object, and receiving the survivors with real kindness, is there any unexampled or inexplicable inconsistency. Take away his evil deeds, and Mahomed Akbar would have been entitled to high praise for his good ones. He is, then, at least, entitled to the benefit of them as a set-off; and, comparing the one with the other, we cannot but rejoice that he did not, by falling into the hands of the English, place them in the

position of passing upon him a judgment which could hardly have been a just one.

Partly for mere justice, partly to show to one-sided observers that even these matters have two sides, we have thought it worth while to bestow thus much attention upon the conduct of a remarkable man. We return to ground more important, and less open to controversy, in returning, for a few words of retrospect, to the relation of England to Affghanistan.

Towards the beginning of these observations, we quoted the declaration of its own intentions, made in 1838, by the Government of India. The subsequent facts are, as we then said, the most striking comment on this declaration, presenting as they do so curious and singular a contrast between the end and the beginning. Such as we have described it was the scheme, and such as we have described it the ultimate fulfilment. Thus were carried out the "confident hopes" of the GovernorGeneral, and thus, but not on the terms which he anticipated, was the "British army finally withdrawn." The contradiction between design and accomplishment is the very common-place of history; but it has seldom been more strikingly shown than in the series of events we have followed.

On the defeat, still more on the destruction, of English forces, employed in whatever cause, we cannot look with any other feeling than mere pain; and if there are any whose patriotism is more cosmopolitan, we are not sure that we envy them this liberality. But, separating, as far as we can, our judgment from our feeling, and looking impartially at this four years' war, from beginning to end, we cannot but see simply this—a great injustice deliberately planned, backed by great power, for a time triumphant, and then, by the natural and direct consequences of injustice, violently overthrown. Let those who can exult in the consideration that much as we have suffered, it is probable we have inflicted yet more; we can derive no consolation from such a thought. Let us honour, as we ought, those who have bravely served their country-but, as a nation, God knows, we have no ground for triumph.

We have received a severe lesson, which we may make a useful one; if we choose to learn from it, well-if not, we shall perpetrate injustice again and again; till, perhaps, another and another before "unparalleled calamity," carrying horror and misery into hundreds of English families, shall, at length, awaken the nation to a right sense of its responsibility, a right sense of the guilt incurred by the careless crimes whereby statesmen bid for majorities, a right sense of a truth, old even in the days we call most ancient, but not worn out now-nor now, nor ever perfectly learned,

NO. XXXI.-N. S.

-ΔΡΑΣΑΝΤΙ ΠΑΘΕΙΝ, τριγέρων μῦθος τάδε φωνεῖ.

G

42

Pious Harriet, &c.
Nisbet and Co.

By the Author of the " Retrospect," &c. 1829.

Little Ann. By the same. Nisbet. 1840.

Food for Babes; or, the First Sermons that very little Children are able to understand. By the Rev. D. BARCLAY BEVAN, M.A. Second Edition. Hatchards. 1841.

Line upon Line, &c. By the Author of the "Peep of Day." Hatchards. 1841.

The Missionary Catechism, to help forward the Young Lambs of Christ's Flock in understanding and promoting the Heavenly Work of Christian Missions. Second Edition. Suter. Suter. 1837. We trust that our readers remember the point to which we had brought the question of the religious development of children in our May number. We laid down the great principle on which we consider all to depend, and which, therefore, can be used at once as a test of other people's errors, and foundation whereon we can build truth ourselves. That principle is the redemption in Christ of our whole nature, and consequently of every stage through which it has to pass from its very beginning. Infancy and childhood, therefore, have both been hallowed, and we must beware how we doubt that our children have received the Christian calling, in their place and degree, and are susceptible of Christian excellence. At the same time, we must be careful in acting upon this, to understand that calling and that degree; since in consecrating children Christ has consecrated childhood, we must accurately observe what childhood is. In attempting an investigation of childhood, we were presented with a phenomenon which we applied to certain popular narratives of religious children, and which condemned some of the favourite topics and views of such compositions. We were led to see how vain was the demand for what is meant by conversion, or for experience in children; and how idle, and worse than idle, it is to impose on them any peculiar line of religious, action.

Before quitting the negative for the positive branch of the subject, before (i. e.) proposing our own plans instead of exposing other people's doings, we must say a few words on two errors more, of a different cast from the former. They proceeded from the confusion between the mind of a child and an adult; those which we are about to consider, from placing too wide a chasm between them.

The first of the two is one on which we have partly spoken our mind already on former occasions, but which is so widely prevalent,

and seems, as far as we can see, so unchecked as yet by what has been said against it, that we are constrained to renew our strictures on it. We mean the error of adapting (as is supposed,) the sacred history to the comprehension of children, by re-writing it in a style supposed to be simpler than that of the Bible, and anyhow very different-a childish undignified style. We allude to such books as one or two of those at the head of our article, "Line upon Line," et id genus omne. Both the work we have just named and the "Peep of Day," were admirably reviewed some years ago, by our contemporary, the British Magazine, from whose observations on them we now make the following

"Inconsiderate people are perpetually complaining of the difficulty of getting children to realize, as they call it, what they read. And no doubt it is a difficulty for children of either a smaller or larger growth to "realize" any other scenes which may be described to them than those which consist principally of elements with which they are quite familiar. This difficulty does not belong to children only, but to all minds of confined views, and therefore to children only as long as their views are confined. As they grow older, and conversant, from month to month, with more and higher things, they can realize' more and more of what they read. If I described a horse-race (with all its crowds and excitement) to a horse-jockey, he would understand it at once, and 'realize' it with a witness, and enter into it with all his heart. But if I gave him a detail of the crowds and the excitement which attend the meetings of that august body, the British Association, perchance, instead of realizing it, he might go to sleep. If I attempted to impress his mind with the sublime ideas which the world of nature presents, or those awful exhibitions of the majesty of the Deity to be found in the Book of Revelation, he would have still more difficulty in the 'realizing process, because emotions connected with 'the sublime 'have never been familiar to him. So is it with young children; try them with the two lastmentioned points, and you try them, of course, in vain, for the self-same reason which has been just assigned,-they have not yet been familiarized with the higher ideas of either moral or intellectual excellence or perfection, or with the emotions which their display is calculated to call forth, and cannot, consequently, enter into them. Now, all this applies most strictly to scripture narratives. No doubt, nothing can exceed their simplicity, in one sense, even where they speak of the Creator or the Redeemer. What, in one sense, can be more simple than the narrative of God's appearing to Moses in the bush, or of the wonderful and sublime scene of the transfiguration ? But what will be the effect of attempting to realize these scenes too completely without the reverential feeling which, before all others, is necessary that they may be realized aright. You may realize scenes of this nature in two ways to those in whom, at a given time, these reverential feelings are not developed. That is to say, you may wait till they are, using all proper means to develop them; or if you will not wait, you may have them realized by stripping them of everything calculated to command reverence, and bringing them down to the level of common, mean, every-day life. The latter is the ready, easy way, and is the natural resort of a coarse and vulgar (though the reviewer willingly allows powerful) mind like Jacob Abbot's. This is the principle on which all his books are written; and it is precisely because in most of us the higher parts of our nature are quite undeveloped, that whatever is so is brought down to the level of mean daily life, and consequently, Abbot's scripture pictures are so generally acceptable. They who read such books realize' all which is told them of their Lord; but they realize it as the history of a mere human being, better, no doubt, than

themselves, but not entitled, on any other ground, to be a whit more reverenced. It is to facilitate this 'realizing' that such books as Abbot's talk of the greater attention that would have been paid him if he had been a gentleman living on his own estate, and a hundred other things much worse; and that these books talk of his wanting his supper, and sending his disciples to look after a man with a jug. In one word, strip scripture characters of everything which a young child cannot understand, (that is to say, of everything which makes scripture precious,) and then the young child will understand it. Yes! he will, and so long as he lives, will read, and understand it in the same way; that is to say, as a common-place history of every-day life, not calculated to excite any higher emotions than a novel or a newspaper. Great obligations, indeed, will he have to the mother, or governess, who set him 'realizing' at three years old, when all his notions were confined to the nursery and bread and butter, and his emotions to the remembrance of pain, when he cut himself, or knocked his head against the table, or his passions, which required control and extirpation."-Vol. xiv. Pp. 553

-555.

"The reviewer takes his leave of these books with a very serious and earnest request to all parents to consider well what they are doing in putting such matter into their children's hands, and whether it is not their solemn duty to endeavour, by degrees, to raise their children's minds to the level of scripture, as far as that can be, and not to lower scripture and its blessed Author to the level of babies' capacities, by the use of words and phrases which will effectually prevent them in after life from giving scripture the reverence due to it."-P. 560.

If we have any objection to these judicious observations, it is that, while vindicating the dignity of sacred things, they rate that of children too low. By the books in question, not only is injustice done to heavenly truth, but also to minds more fitted for its reception than the reviewer seems to allow. Children surely have, pre-eminently have, capacities for veneration and for realizing greatness; they have, they are "familiar” with, "emotions connected with the sublime;" their minds can be impressed "with the sublime ideas which the world of nature presents," and still more "with those awful exhibitions of the majesty of the Deity to be found in the Book of Revelation." If one thing more than another moves our ire, it is needless condescension of language in addressing children, or in preaching to the poor. There is an insolence in it which we think both classes have penetration to perceive, and self-respect to resent. Of course, neither should be addressed in language of which it knows nothing; of course scientific terms, and a logical cast of our sentences are to be avoided when we are speaking to either. But though our speech must thus be very plain, it needs not, therefore, be undignified; and if it be, we can have no readers or hearers more quickly alive to the defect than the classes in question. Children and the poor know what dignity is as well as we do, and they look for it both in books and in the pulpit; their fancies may, now and then, be tickled by an unexpected departure from it in either, but their healthy judgments disapprove of such departure notwithstanding. Besides, the trick is apparent; they know it to be meant for condescension to them;