The Press. — 1854-07-15 (London, England)

JULY 15, 1854.  suicides, triple duels, and crying ladies in white satin. If the boor of Anglo-Saxon race, the countryman of Bacon and Newton, and the subject of Queen Victoria, experience difficulties in rising to a perception of the beauties of the most popular of our poets, what shadows must there be before the simple pagan mind before it can be brought to adore a Reedemer whose kingdom is not of this world? At this point the sceptical and the lukewarm stop, flippantly pronouncing that missionary toils must be as fruitless as giving Schlegel on Othello. or Coleridge on Hamlet, to rustics. They forget, however, that, if a labourer has been accustomed to a Sunday school, and habituated to hearing the Bible read by an aged parent or his lisping children, its words of power and love go home to his heart, purifying and refreshing his simple soul. If he grow up in infidelity and vice he might, as a practical pagan, have as much difficulty in perceiving the truth and beauty of the Bible as a cannibal of New Zealand. It is, therefore, we contend, of great importance and of practical utility to habituate the heathen to Christian influences, to accustom him to the sight of his conquerors humbling themselves before the Invisible, and in tempting him to inquire how they worship their " Great Spirit." There are parables in the Gospel which, if adequately translated, will go home to universal man. Nor should we forget, on this point, that the words of those divine discourses have been preserved, while the substance of the reasonings with the worldly-wise doctors in the Temple have been omitted. We conclude these remarks by observing that our modern facilities of communication, our multiplied physical discoveries and mechanical inventions, must have as great result on the missionary influence as the mariner's compass and the printing-press had on dispelling the night of the dark arges, and rescuing the Bible from the clutch of the Church of Rome. There exists no reason for doubting that our intellectual advancement must ao celerate the progress of Christianity amongst the nations ; and it is because the work before us is defective in the profound consideration of this greatest of all subjects that we can give it but qualified praise.  The Rusinans in Bulgaria and Rumelia, in 1828 and 1829. From the German of Baron von Moltke. London : Murray. THIS memoir was published by the author in German in 1845, and, as ample use has been made of it in the various works which have since been issued on the war between Russia and Turkey in 1828-9, its substance was tolerably well known before this translation appeared. The author served with the Turkish army through the campaigns he described, and his narrative is marked throughout, not only by exact knowledge, but by the most scrupulous good faith. With such trustworthy information spread through Europe, it is easy to understand how last summer and autumn general opinion (and especially among competent military authorities) formed strongly against the success of the Russians in the impending war. That notion of the weakness of Turkey and of the invincibility of her antagonist, which a Ministerial paper—the most influential of our journals—so industriously propagated, must be attributed to complicity, as it could scarcely have proceeded from ignorance. The reader is here presented with a military view of all the chief events of the campaigns of 1828-9, illustrated by welldrawn plans of fortresses and battles, and instructed in the accidents which led to that treaty of Adrianople on which Lord Aberdeen wrote so gloomy a commentary. In every case a writer's judgment is likely to be greatly biassed by the result of the events he narrates. Our author possesses great penetration, yet, overlooking the vigorous defence made by the Turks in their Danubian fortresses, he hazards an opinion that the more it has become necessary for the Porte since its repeated disasters to concentrate its forces, the more certain is it that the defence of Turkey in Europe, in the event of any future war, can only begin at the Balkan.  In the campaigns of 1853-4 the defence has not only begun but has been successfully ter