Being unencumbered with fastidiousness, this person before long made various rude attacks on the truth and authority of the Christian religion, and drew me on to defend it.

What I had heard of the moral life of the speaker made me feel that his was not the mind to have insight into divine truth; and I desired to divert the argument from external topics, and bring it to a point in which there might be a chance of touching his conscience.

But I found this to be impossible.

He returned actively to the assault against Christianity, and I could not bear to hear him vent historical falsehoods and misrepresentations damaging to the Christian cause, without contradicting them.

He was a half-educated man, and I easily confuted him to my own entire satisfaction: but he was not either abashed or convinced; and at length withdrew as one victorious .-- On reflecting over this, I felt painfully, that if a Moslem had been present and had understood all that had been said, he would have remained in total uncertainty which of the two disputants was in the right: for the controversy had turned on points wholly remote from the sphere of his knowledge or thought.
Yet to have declined the battle would have seemed like conscious weakness on my part.