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From Here to Forever
from the plain sense of Scripture, and ... suppose that when they are
reading Jews, they must understand Gentiles; and when they read
Jerusalem, they must understand the church; and if it is said earth, it
means sky; and for the coming of the Lord they must understand the
progress of the missionary societies; and going up to the mountain
of the Lord’s house, signifies a grand class meeting of Methodists.
From 1821 to 1845, Wolff traveled in Egypt, Abyssinia, Pales-
tine, Syria, Persia, Bokhara, India, and the United States.
Power in the Book
Dr. Wolff traveled in the most barbarous countries without pro-
tection, enduring hardships and surrounded with countless perils.
He was starved, sold as a slave, three times condemned to death,
beset by robbers, and sometimes nearly perished from thirst. Once
he was stripped and left to travel hundreds of miles on foot through
mountains, snow beating in his face and his naked feet benumbed
by the frozen ground.
When warned against going unarmed among savage, hostile
tribes, he declared himself “provided with arms”—“prayer, zeal for
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Christ, and confidence in His help.” “I am also provided with the
love of God and my neighbor in my heart, and the Bible is in my
hand.” “I felt my power was in the Book, and that its might would
sustain me.
He persevered until the message had been carried to a large
part of the habitable globe. Among Jews, Turks, Parsees, Hindus,
and other nationalities and races he distributed the Word of God
in various tongues, and everywhere heralded the approach of the
Messiah.
In Bokhara he found the doctrine of the Lord’s soon coming
held by an isolated people. The Arabs of Yemen, he 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.” “I found children of Israel, of the
3
Journal of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, p. 96.
4
W. H. D. Adams, In Perils Oft, pp. 192, 201.