CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Wolff: Ambassador of the Coming Kingdom

JOSEPH WOLFF, likewise of the Advent Awakening, was a most unique character. He was the world’s most noted missionary traveler and linguist of his generation. Of Jewish birth, Catholic education, and finally Protestant persuasion and adoption, he was born in Germany, educated in a half dozen countries, and at last was naturalized in England. These factors, together with his marriage to Lady Georgiana Walpole, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, and his financial backing, provided by the banker Henry Drummond, opened the door of access even to England’s nobility, as he became known throughout the world because of his trips to inner Asia. While he wrote no books on prophecy, probably no other individual ever traveled so widely as he in witnessing to the prophetic aspect of the second advent before such varied classes and diversified nationalities.PFF3 461.1

Accomplished in fourteen languages and expert in about six, Wolff preached to Jews, Turks, Parsis, Hindus, Chaldeans, Armenians, and Syrians-to mention but a few-and testified before pashas, sheiks, shahs, kings, and queens, and even American Presidents, as well as the humblest natives. He was the missionary representative of the London Society to Promote Christianity Amongst the Jews, and a major participant in the Albury Park Prophetic Conference. It is essential that we trace his career with unusual detail, as his life was intertwined with the leading influences and the most distinguished characters of the nineteenth-century Old World Advent Awakening.PFF3 461.2

Picture 1: WOLFF PENETRATES INNERMOST RECESSES OF ISLAM
This intrepid herald of the returning messiah traveled more widely than any Other manof his time to announce the soon coming second advent throughout Asia, Asia Minor. Africa.Europe, and America.Where he spoke before the assembled congress
page 461PFF3 461

Joshua W. Brooks, editor of The Investigator, declares that “no individual has perhaps given greater publicity to the doc trine of the Second Coming. ^{1The Investigator, or Monthly Expositor and Register, on Prophecy, April, 1836 (New Series, no. 2, vol. 5, no. 44), p. 88.} From 1821 to 1827 Wolff’s travel was sponsored by Henry Drummond and John Bayford, who met his expenses, while from 1827 to 1831 he went forth as a regular missionary of the London Society. But in 1828 he relinquished his support ^{2Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, p. 599.} by the society, though still accountable to them, to avoid the twitting of the Jews, who accused him of mercenary motives, and to show that love was his only motive. ^{3The Jewish Expositor, February, 1828 (vol. 13), p. 64.}PFF3 463.1

In the Journal of the Rev. Joseph Wolff (1839), presented as a series of letters to Sir Thomas Baring, president of the Society to Promote Christianity Amongst the Jews, Wolff states in the Preface that he had “traversed the most barbarous countries for eighteen years, without protection of any European authority whatsoever, and ... [had] been sold as a slave, thrice condemned to death, attacked with cholera and typhus fever, and almost every Asiatic fever in existence, and bastinadoed and starved.” ^{4Journal of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, p. vi.} His heart-cries for godliness, power, and perseverance ^{5Missionary Journal and Memoir, of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, pp. 207, 325; first published serially in The Jewish Expositor.} reveal the secret of his influence. Despite his tremendous record of travel and versatility, curiously enough Wolff could not ride a horse or a donkey, swim, cook his own “victuals,” sit cross-legged, or shave himself. ^{6Travels and Adventures, pp. 284, 85. 234.}PFF3 463.2

Let us note the high lights in the varied career of this odd genius. ^{7The ordination sermon, preached by Bishop Doane, not only gives a clear sketch of Wolff’s life but tabulates about the most complete list of the places visited in the peregrinations of Wolff. (George Washington Doane, The Apostolical Commission, the Missionary Charter of the Church, pp. 23, 24.) An impressive map of the places visited by Wolff in his extensive travels appears in H. P. Palmer’s Joseph Wolff, p. 8.}PFF3 463.3