verywhere a controverted point between him and
the priesthood. 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. And I also
wondered, after he saw this, that he should not be willing so much
as to ask me, in mildness and forbearance, for what reasons I was
unwilling to receive the doctrines of the Pope, or to say, that I
believed as he did. But, so far from this, he laid every person, and
even his own brother under excommunication, should they presume to
dispute or converse with me on the subject of religion. Entirely
bereft of books, and shut out from all persons who might instruct
me, from what quarter could I get the evidence necessary to persuade
me to accept the Patriarch's opinions?

"Another cause I had of wonder was, that not one of all with whom I
conversed, when he thought me heretical, advised me to use the only
means of becoming strong in the faith, namely, prayer to God Most
High, and searching his Holy Word, which a child may understand. I
wondered, too, that they should ridicule and report me abroad as
insane, and after all this, be afraid to engage in a dispute with
the madman, lest he should turn them away from the truth."

As the Patriarch, and the Bishop of Beirut, whose diocese included
Hadet, were determined to shut him out from the people, and even
threatened his life, Asaad resolved on escaping to Beirut, which he
accomplished, as already stated, on the