1904] 
H. Beveridge— Observations on General Maclagan 1 s paper. 49 
Observations on General Maclagan’s paper on the Jesuit Missions to the 
Emperor Akbar , J.A.S.B. for 1896, £>. 38.— By H. Beveridge. 
[Read November, 1903.] 
General Maclagan’s paper is a very valuable and interesting one, 
but he has fallen into some mistakes from relying upon Mr. Rehatsek, 
etc. I beg to offer the following remarks as supplementary to it: 
It is somewhat singular that the writers who have discussed the 
religious opinions of the Emperor Akbar have said so comparatively 
little about the account of them given by Abul-Fazl in the historical 
portion of the Akbarnama. 
Mr. Blochmann has noticed the references in the Ain-i-Akbari, and 
he, as well as Yans Kennedy, H. H. Wilson, Rehatsek and General 
Maclagan, have given full abstracts of Badayuni’s account of the 
matter. But they have said little about the references in the historical 
parts of the Akbarnama, and with the exception of Rehatsek, none of 
them has noticed the chapter in the Akbarnama which deals expressly 
with Akbar’s position as the founder of a religion. This chapter occurs 
in the annals of the 24th year of the reign and is headed “ The accept¬ 
ance by the wise men of the age of the spiritual authority (Ijtihad) of 
the world’s lord.” 
This chapter is to be found in Yol. Ill, p. 268 of the Bib. Ind. ed., 
which corresponds to Yol. Ill, p. 140 of the Cawnpore ed. Rehatsek 
has indeed referred, though without citing the page, to two passages 
in this chapter, but he has not done so correctly, and so he has misled 
General Maclagan. 
Mr. Rehatsek, who was a man of varied accomplishments, but the 
conditions of whose life were not favourable to accuracy, published in 
the Calcutta Review for January 1886 an article called “ Missionaries 
to the Mogul Court,” and at page 3 he makes two erroneous statements. 
The first is that Abul Fazl states that the malevolent rumour of Akbar’s 
hatred to Muhammadanism and of his having become a Brahman, was 
refuted by the Christian philosophers. Evidently this refers to two 
J. i. 7 
