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The Great Controversy
Pennsylvania, in whose presence I delivered lectures on my researches
in Asia, and also on the personal reign of Jesus Christ.”—Ibid., pages
398, 399.
Dr. Wolff traveled in the most barbarous countries without the
protection of any European authority, enduring many hardships and
surrounded with countless perils. He was bastinadoed and starved,
sold as a slave, and three times condemned to death. He was beset
by robbers, and sometimes nearly perished from thirst. Once he was
stripped of all that he possessed and left to travel hundreds of miles on
foot through the mountains, the snow beating in his face and his naked
feet benumbed by contact with the frozen ground.
When warned against going unarmed among savage and hostile
tribes, he declared himself “provided with arms”—“prayer, zeal for
Christ, and confidence in His help.” “I am also,” he said, “provided
with the love of God and my neighbor in my heart, and the Bible is
in my hand.”—W.H.D. Adams, In Perils Oft, page 192. The Bible in
Hebrew and English he carried with him wherever he went. Of one
of his later journeys he says: “I ... kept the Bible open in my hand.
I felt my power was in the Book, and that its might would sustain
me.”—Ibid., page 201.
Thus he persevered in his labors until the message of the judgment
had been carried to a large part of the habitable globe. Among Jews,
Turks, Parsees, Hindus, and many other nationalities and races he
distributed the word of God in these various tongues and everywhere
heralded the approaching reign of the Messiah.
In his travels in Bokhara he found the doctrine of the Lord’s soon
coming held by a remote and isolated people. The Arabs of Yemen, he
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says, “are in possession of a book called Seera, which gives notice of
the second coming of Christ and His reign in glory; and they expect
great events to take place in the year 1840.”—Journal of the Rev.
Joseph Wolff, page 377. “In Yemen ... I spent six days with the
children of Rechab. They drink no wine, plant no vineyard, sow no
seed, and live in tents, and remember good old Jonadab, the son of
Rechab; and I found in their company children of Israel, of the tribe of
Dan, ... who expect, with the children of Rechab, the speedy arrival of
the Messiah in the clouds of heaven.”—Ibid., page 389.
A similar belief was found by another missionary to exist in Tatary.
A Tatar priest put the question to the missionary as to when Christ