Travels and Adventures of REV. JOSEPH WOLFF, D. D., LL. D., Vicar of Ile Brewers, and late Missionary to the Jews and Muhammadans in Persia, Bokhara, Cashmeer, &c. 2 vols. 8vo. London: Saunders, Otley, & Co. 1861.

A RELIGIOUS autobiography, announced in its Preface "to be a standard book like Robinson Crusoe," full of incident, repartee, adventure, suffering, and achievement, so arranged as to keep before one's eyes all the while nobody else but its hero, may well attract and reward our study. An independent missionary to the Jews and Mohammedans, and now the quiet vicar of a petty English hamlet, Wolff gives us in the third person his whole life's experiences, bidding us rely on his wonderful powers of memory for minute details of conversations and trivial adventures of his childhood, now put upon record for the first time in sixty years. His very beginning is the promise of a strange career; indeed, no youth was ever more the father of the man than was this Jewish lad the promise of an eccentric, enterprising, ambitious, conceited man. The elder Wolff, first Rabbi in Weilersbach, Bavaria, inculcated an intense reverence for Jewish tradition, and a longing expectation of the approaching advent of their promised Messiah,impressions which young Joseph only directed anew when he went forth to convert his former brethren away from the faith of their fathers, to a conviction of the rapidly approaching Redeemer, grounded on a new translation of their own Prophets. His vanity was kindled first at the thought of becoming a great scholar like Maimonides, then of going to Rome, and becoming a Pope with the title of Hildebrand,last, of being a world-renowned missionary, like Xavier.

The Talmudical account of the death of Titus awakened the child's desire to hear about Jesus. Onckelos is there said to have raised up Titus, and asked him how he would treat the Jews. "Torture them," is the answer. Jesus is then asked, and his reply to the question is, "Treat them well." So Wolff wished to know more; and his father said, "Jesus was a Jew of the greatest ability, killed for pretending to be the

Messiah." A Christian barber, who bade the boy go home and read the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, was the first person to make an impression upon young Joseph. Wolff then asked his father to explain the passage in the prophet, and afterwards overheard him weeping, and saying to his mother, “God have mercy on us! our son will not remain a Jew." By and by a relative led the lad to the Catholic Lyceum, where the lecturer spoke enthusiastically of Xavier, Loyola, &c., and upon Wolff's returning to the house and declaring his intention to preach the Gospel like Xavier, the man laughed, but his wife seized a poker, cursed the renegade, and drove him out into the streets. Then began wanderings year after year from city to city and from college to college, less abhorrent to German notions than to ours, but a type of the wandering life which the man Wolff was to lead. From twelve years of age to twenty his living seems to have been obtained sometimes by charity, sometimes by teaching Hebrew, sometimes from the kindness of those who loved a beautiful boy or admired a precocious one. But everybody seems to have been kind to him; the Jews he was leaving, the Catholics who felt sure of a convert, the Rationalists who thought to make prize of so conceited a youth. At the Propaganda in Rome, whither he drifted at last, his experience is equally amusing and amazing. One of his fellow-students said, "Wolff, how could you pat the Pope's shoulders? Are you not aware that the Pope is God." Wolff became, according to his own account, red as a turkeycock, and answered, "How dare you say so? The Pope is dust of the earth. If he was God I could not have touched him." Whereupon all the collegians, professors, rectors, and vice-rectors rose from their seats, and exclaimed, "Wolff, what are you saying?" Wolff replied, "This fellow called the Pope God, and I say he is dust of the earth; who is right?" One answered, "Is it not said, Ye are Gods?" "Yes," Wolff replied, "which shall be broken to pieces." Another said, "He is God on earth, for he has all power in heaven, on earth, and in purgatory." Another said, "We may call him God in a large sense." And another, "He may be called God in a most pious sense."

When Protestants as well as Catholics condemned such in

solence in a mere stripling, Wolff frankly owned that his great enemies his life through had always been his own vanity and ambition, and that at Rome his vanity made him believe he knew everything better than his teachers; and as people told him he resembled Luther in appearance, he hoped to be a Luther in his stormy and wild career; while, at the same time, his insatiable ambition.made him aim at becoming Pope, as he openly avowed in the College de Propaganda.

Before long he was arrested by the Inquisition, his rash expressions and his entire correspondence brought up in accusation, but no injustice was done him and no severity threatened. A courier of the Pope, a guard of gens d'armes, and a member of the Inquisition escorted him out of the Holy City to Vienna, with letters mentioning him with unvarying kindness, as he discovered by picking the courier's pockets on the journey.

It shows how easily, by a little more patience, Rome might have enlisted in its service this apostle of the age, as his friends call him, that he never failed in after life to defend this gentle stepmother; that he would not allow the Pope to be called Antichrist; that he kept up an active sympathy with some of her officials; and that he yet hopes to bring the English Church into closer harmony with the Romish. Indeed, united to such glowing zeal, his breadth of sympathy is very remarkable. Excepting an occasional fling at the Unitarian brethren, he sees something good and helps others to see it -in every part of the Church, even in earlier forms of belief and modes of worship than the Christian. Nor does any peril intimidate, nor any chance of profit hold back, his confessions of heresy; he almost boasts of his Jewish extraction; his friendship for Edward Irving he is at no pains to conceal; he refuses to turn Mussulman when it seems the only way to save his life. Surely this tenacity to his convictions in one dependent upon religious charity for his daily bread, united with so large a catholicity, is some compensation for his superstition, credulity, self-esteem, and vulgarity of speech. For Wolff's faults, which he likes to publish, as well as his graces, were never united before in Christian minister, were never brought under a check by himself, nor even heartily repented of. If he could speak a dozen tongues, he never could bridle his own from

calling ministers, officers, noblemen, committees liars, jackasses, and scoundrels. If he had moral intrepidity, he was physically such a pitiful coward as to tremble at crossing a bridge on an elephant, cry in a storm at sea, and shut himself up from a visitation of the cholera, which the Romish missionaries at Cairo met without flinching. If he was ingenious in encountering his opponents, they sometimes twisted him round their fingers like so much thread, through that enormous credulity of his, which announced the millennium as certain to begin in the year of our Lord 1847.

At Rome he had met the wealthy, gifted, and eccentric Henry Drummond, head of the Irvingites, member of Parliament, and a London banker. Wolff's zeal, learning, independence, familiarity with Oriental tongues, Jewish birth and sympathies, prompted Mr. Drummond to offer him support in an independent mission to his Jewish brethren throughout the world. His commission is actually comical: none like it has ever been given in any church. After prolonged discussion at London with the committee of the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, during which Wolff betrayed his restlessness under any sort of restraint, Drummond closes the conference by saying to him, "Now, you foolish fellow, you may go to Jerusalem and cry out in the midst of the streets as you would; and if you commit follies it is not my fault. I shall lay down neither rules nor orders how you are to act, but I will pay the expenses."

So, after several years' study of those Oriental languages for which he had evidently rare qualifications, at the age of twenty-six Wolff starts on his missionary campaign, with letters of recommendation from Sir Thomas Baring, with twenty camels' loads of Hebrew Bibles, and an inexhaustible fund of assurance. Jerusalem was his first field, but too limited a one for his roving spirit. Resting but a little while even in the most central spots, and organizing nothing, not even a school, he actively roams over Asia, everywhere reasoning with the Rabbis, — questioning, exhorting, preaching, prophesying, joking, and story-telling. Sometimes beaten, sometimes caressed, sometimes stripped naked, sometimes worshipped, sometimes famished, sometimes feasted, he thought

his end was gained by provoking inquiry, circulating the Scriptures, and making a sensation. And yet, though he formed no church anywhere, and established no permanent intercourse with his converts, his strength was not spent entirely in vain, because the Oriental mind treasures up such occasional appeals, broods over such a rare visitation, reveres such a dervish eccentricity. Retired from the busy tides of life, a Persian devotee would retain the strange words of this "Wandering Jew," would read over and over again his parting legacy, the Gospel, and might hand unimpaired to his children the imperishable seed of divine truth.

Still, there were some tangible results of so many years of missionary travel. Wolff professes, in the first place, to have given the world the clearest insight into the state of the Jews from Constantinople almost throughout Asia. Second, two hundred Jews in Constantinople and Adrianople were converted by him, endured persecution, and came out purified from the fire; through the help, it must be owned, of Sir Stratford Canning, the all-powerful British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Third, light has been thrown upon the condition of the Moslem and Christian churches through a vast extent of country, some of it before unvisited. Fourth, the possibility of a missionary's living and preaching in the most barbarous Moslem lands has been demonstrated,-we should say very partially. A vagrant might be tolerated for a month, where a resident for life would be driven away. Fifth, many Jews have been led, not merely to read the Gospels, but to translate them into Hebrew with Perso-Jewish characters. Sixth, Mohammedans in Khorassan and Turkistan, and Sikhs in the Punjaub, have learnt for the first time that there were Europeans who feared God!

This is the substance of Wolff's own claims. But this perpetually wandering apostle, sweeping like our refreshing eastern breeze among the stagnant pools of Jerusalem, Cairo, and Bokhara, proclaiming himself the ambassador of Christ to those who would hear and those who would forbear, reasoning with any who dared to reason on the highest theme which can engage the human soul, joking with those who preferred to joke, meeting threats with calm defiance, and ridicule with