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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 amongst 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.” 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.”
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, Hindoos, 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
says, “are in possession of a book called ‘Seera,’ which gives notice
of the coming of Christ and his reign in glory, and they expect great
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events to take place in the year 1840.” “In Yemen I spent six days with
the Rechabites. They drink no wine, plant no vineyards, sow no seed,
live in tents, and remember the words of Jonadab, the son of Rechab.
With them were the children of Israel of the tribe of Dan, ... who
expect, in common with the children of Rechab, the speedy arrival of
the Messiah in the clouds of heaven.”
A similar belief was found by another missionary to exist in Tartary.
A Tartar priest put the question to the missionary, as to when Christ
would come the second time. When the missionary answered that
he knew nothing about it, the priest seemed greatly surprised at such
ignorance in one who professed to be a Bible teacher, and stated his
own belief, founded on prophecy, that Christ would come about 1844.
As early as 1826 the Advent message began to be preached in
England. The movement here did not take so definite a form as in
America, the exact time of the advent was not so generally taught, but