The weakness of the reasoning on the papal side was everywhere so apparent to him, as greatly to strengthen his evangelical faith.

In one of his interviews with the Patriarch he said: "I would ask of you the favor to send from your priests two faithful men to preach the Gospel through the country; and I am ready, if necessary, to sell all I possess and give it towards their wages." He afterwards offered to go himself and preach the Gospel.
But neither of these proposals was accepted.
1 See _Missionary Herald_ for 1827, pp.

71-76, 97-101.
He was at length deprived of his books, and severely threatened by the Patriarch.

"Fearing," he says, "that I should be found among the fearful (Rev.xxi.

8), I turned, and said to him, 'I will hold fast the religion of Jesus Christ, and I am ready, for the sake of it, to shed my blood; and though you should all become infidels, yet will not I;' and so left the room." Asaad says, in his narrative: "A friend told me, that the Patriarch wondered how I should pretend that I held to the Christian religion, and still converse in such abusive terms against it.