bad words among the customers in her father's shop, she would run up and cry, 'Shut door, shut door: Ah! naughty man." When a relative, a grown-up man, was kind to her, she found he had been doing wrong, and would not go to him, but told him earnestly her feelings about what he had done;' and reproved her elder brother for not being quiet at grace-time with a grave "Ah! boy!' She told her mother of all boys who behaved ill at church, and acted as a perpetual religious scarecrow among friends, relations, and companions. It was impossible that such a child could live; and so at last this hapless little paragon, free from all the other ills of mortality, falls into a desperate sickness. Dr. Bolus comes, and orders bitter physic; but of course she only enjoys the draughts, with pleasure takes off a fourth blister with her own fingers; and yet in the very agony of the disease, when death was near, was able once more to reprove her father for not coming up to prayers.'* She was three years and a half old at the time of her death. The author of this sickly trashdoes not favour us with his name, but in the Preface states that Nothing has been added to the simple truth of this infant's angelic life;' but suspecting that some will be found to question the possibility of the details,' he has the cool impudence to take for his own shield such sacred words as they speak that they do know and testify that they have seen;' while he leaves for those who doubt his truthfulness a text from the Second Book of Kings, If the Lord would make windows in heaven might this thing be?' In reply to this application we beg leave not simply to question, but to deny in toto, the possibility of the details which he has clustered round this unhappy little abortion of a baby. No such child ever lived. But if anything approaching such a hapless creature was ever in existence, it must have been gradually and carefully trained by unceasing mismanagement into an unhealthy and diseased state of body and of mind. It is utterly unnatural for any little child to hate play and playthings; to be always on the watch to act the part of the Pharisee, or to spend hours in prayer before it is old enough to speak, or has wit enough to understand the words of others. Such a baby, if he were possible, instead of being the light and sunshine of the house, as a child should be,‡ would be an intolerable nuisance. We come next to 'The History of the Fairchild Family,' by 6 * Far more natural are the words of a real, living child, Marjorie Fleming (ætat 6): I am very sorry that I forgot God, that is, I forgot to pray to-day; and Isabella told me I should be thankful that God did not forget me. If He did, what would become of me?'-Pet Marjorie, p. 17. II. Kings, vii. 2. Every house,' says Robert Southey, 'should have in it a baby of six months, and a kitten rising six weeks old.' Mrs. Mrs. Sherwood, in 3 vols. 8vo., a Child's Manual,' founded on the belief not only that such 'Babies,' as we have just described, may exist up to four years of age, but that a father and mother and three children are to be found of the very same incomparable genus. Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild, and their three children aged nine, eight, and seven years, 'lived very far away from any town,' and their manner of life is rather fully detailed in about nine hundred pages of small print. Each volume contains about twenty-five chapters, and each chapter a story or conversation, a hymn, and a prayer, generally intended to illustrate and explain some besetting sin, to expatiate on the moral and religious excellences of the father and mother, the awful depravity of their children, or of some acquaintance or friend not yet converted to Mr. Fairchild's special views. The grand, fundamental idea which seems to underlie the teaching of the whole book, and is constantly impressed on the minds of the children with unwearied and cruel iteration, is that of their own utter, entire, unmitigated, constant wickedness in thought, word, and action; their love for wickedness, and their fitness for hell to which they are all most surely and infallibly doomed, and to which they must go unless God specially save them. This is a prayer for little Lucy, p. 88, My heart is so exceedingly wicked, so vile, so full of sin, that even when I appear to people about me to be tolerably good, even then I am sinning, &c.; even when I am praying, or reading the Bible, or hearing other people read the Bible, even then I sin. When I speak, I sin; when I am silent, I sin.' This is in exact accordance with the teaching of two other little books ('Line upon Line' and 'Peep of Day') in which the same gloomy picture is drawn ; the only difference being that in these books an incredible amount of silliness is introduced, from which Mrs. Sherwood is free. Thus, a dialogue, entitled 'The Soul,' commences with stuff of this kind: 'Have you feathers on your skin? Have you wings? Is your mouth like a chicken's beak? &c. Can a dog thank God? No; dogs and horses, sheep and cows cannot thank God.'* In the chapter on 'Wicked Angels,' we have 'The devil hopes very much that you will come and live with him when you die.' 6 When you say "I don't care," you are like the devil. Wherr you think yourself good, you are proud like the devil,' &c. In * David, indeed, calls on 'Beasts and all cattle, creeping things, and flying fowl, to bless God's holy name for ever,' Ps. cxlviii. 10; he talks of Valleys standing so thick with corn that they laugh and sing,' we suppose to Him who made them; but he clearly knew nothing of the matter, or of the Peep of Day;" otherwise, he would not have said, 'Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord." · another another chapter, entitled 'The Son of God,' we find mixed with the silliness a vein of profanity, and cool, glib familiarity in handling the most sacred topics, as painful as it is amazing— which entirely agrees with the whole tone and spirit of the 'Fairchild Family,' and is impudently proposed as better suited to young children than the simple, solemn, beauty of the Book of Genesis. Thus : 'Are you not sorry that Adam and Eve were turned out of the garden? Adam was forced to dig till he was hot and tired, &c. Eve was very often sick, &c. &c. God had said a long while before, Adam and Eve and all their children must go to hell for their wickedness unless you die instead of them, &c.'* Genesis having been thus improved,' the first chapter of St. Luke's Gospel is turned into such intolerable twaddle as the following: He 'God chose that his Son should be a little baby first, because everybody is a little baby at first. Fear not, Mary, God loves you. will send you a baby that shall be the Son of God. Mary was much surprised, &c., she thought she was not good enough to have such a baby, &c. &c., she called her baby her Saviour, for she knew that he would save her from hell, &c. &c.' The resurrection of Lazarus is treated in this style: At last they came to the grave. 'It was a hole, and a very large stone was before the hole, &c. Then Jesus spoke loud and said, &c. But Jesus said, "Undo the cloths!!!" The solemn entry of Christ our Lord into Jerusalem is degraded into a profane travesty in this fashion: 'Jesus walked fast along the road, at last he came near to Jerusalem. Then he stopped, and said, I shall ride into Jerusalem upon an ass. He had no ass of his own: he always walked, &c. &c. They began to untie the ass, but a man standing near said: Why do you untie the ass? &c. &c.: I suppose that man loved the Lord Jesus, and liked to lend him his things.' When, after the agony in the Garden, Christ proclaimed himself as He whom they sought : 'God made all the wicked people fall upon their backs, &c.; the wicked people soon got up! God let them get up, &c. &c.' So, also, after the resurrection : The women said, Let us get more spices, and make sweet ointment Where, or to whom this was said, we are not told. to to put on the Lord Jesus. Joseph had put some spices, but they wanted to put more. So they went home, and made nice ointment!!!? Extracts of this kind might easily be multiplied to an indefinite extent, for the whole of the Old Testament History, as well as much of the New, has been handled with the same lamentable want of good taste and even of common Christian reverence for the sacred text of Scripture. But enough has been done, we think, to show our readers the tone and drift of these books; and we now return to the Fairchild Family,' and the three hapless little people whose minds are to be saturated with the two primary ideas that all children are utterly, entirely, continually, and only given up to sin in thought, word, and deed; and therefore certainly doomed to, and intended for, hell;—children, be it remembered, of whom the Great Teacher said, 'Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.' What effect such perilous teaching had on the Fairchilds, as here drawn, we have yet to see; but what fruit such poisonous falsehoods bear in real life, let a recent remarkable autobiography testify. The authoress had been brought up in the narrowest sect of Protestantism, and duly fed on 'The Children's Friend,' and Mrs. Sherwood; and being an earnest, thoughtful girl, 'had a strong desire to conquer what was amiss in her :' 'I remember,' she says, once attempting something like selfexamination, and an enumeration of the day's faults. I was told that it was an impossibility, that there was not a moment or an action of our lives that was not full of sin; I remember thinking to myself, If it is so, then there is not the least use in trying to mend or alter, because it can't be done. I did think that I knew I had committed seven or eight sins to-day, but according to this there is nothing that is not wrong. So I gave up that effort in despair.' In the 'Fairchild Family,' however, things go on very differently. Here the children are taught the very same hopeless creed, and the result in each successive chapter seems to run on in one uniform dull stream. Henry having had it well preached into him that he is wholly swallowed up in sinfulness, and can do nothing right or good, is specially cautioned against certain sins; he immediately falls into those sins, but in the course of the next two pages is preached into confessing his faults, offers up a prayer, and sings a hymn with the rest of the family; and, having sinned all through one day, is thus ready for Thirty years in the English Church,' an Autobiography, p. 219. Questions of the Day, edited by Orbey Shipley, M.A. the the next chapter and for the fresh sins of to-morrow. To illustrate our meaning more clearly, we will glance through four successive chapters, the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, of Vol. I. Chapter seven is on the sin of Envy, and thus it runs: little Emily, in walking to the village, picks up a diamond-ring belonging to Lady Noble, who rewards her with a new doll from London. Home goes the child, in rapture, to dress the doll. Lucy is asked to help in dressing her, but persists in refusing, and sits in a corner, and cries because the doll is not hers. Mrs. F., who is on the watch for the first signs of envy, soon detects them, calls up the wicked Lucy, has a dialogue on the depravity of the human heart, and at last extracts from the child a confession that she is sorry her sister has a doll, hopes her mother won't hate her for it, she knows it is wicked, and can't help it.' The mother replies that envy is in every man's heart, and it is also felt by devils.' Then follows a prayer against envy (of the same kind as the previous one), and a hymn. And from that day forward Lucy never felt envious of Emily's doll,” &c. But, by the next day, they are all ready to break the sixth commandment, which is the subject of chapter eight. Mr. F. coming down stairs hears the children quarrelling. Henry wants to play with the doll; says Lucy, you shan't have it,' says Emily, he shall.' Then follow kicks, slapping, and pinching; in the midst of which enter papa, who, seeing their faces red and their eyes full of anger,' seized on dolly, and, taking a rod from the cupboard, whipped hands' all round till they smarted, saying 6 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite, The culprits were then set in the corner, and kept there without breakfast till about 12:30, when the roast-beef being nearly ready, and the smell savoury, they confessed their wickedness, said they didn't mean it, were duly reminded of Cain and Abel, and then allowed to sit down to dinner. But, in the evening they are all taken to Blackwood, a thick, dark, dismal wood, to see 'somebody who hated his brother.' The 'somebody' turns out to be the body of a man hanging in chains from a gibbet,' and apparently in excellent preservation after some years of exposure, *Too' is a sad corruption of the original text, and in utter defiance of Dr. Watts, who argues that children should not fight because it is not their nature 'to.' for |