s
himself; not that I had ever read them, or he either, perhaps, but I
retained a number of passages taken from my Le Sueur, and when he bore
hard on me with one citation, without standing to dispute, I parried it
with another, which method embarrassed him extremely. At length,
however, he got the better of me for two very potent reasons; in the
first place, he was of the strongest side; young as I was, I thought it
might be dangerous to drive him to extremities, for I plainly saw the old
priest was neither satisfied with me nor my erudition. In the next
place, he had studied, I had not; this gave a degree of method to his
arguments which I could not follow; and whenever he found himself pressed
by an unforeseen objection he put it off to the next conference,
pretending I rambled from the question in dispute. Sometimes he even
rejected all my quotations, maintaining they were false, and, offering to
fetch the book, defied me to find them. He knew he ran very little risk,
and that, with all my borrowed learning, I was not sufficiently
accustomed to books, and too poor a Latinist to find a passage in a large
volume, had I been ever so well assured it was there. I even suspected
him of having been guilty of a perfidy with which he accused our
ministers, and that he fabricated passages sometimes in order to evade an
objection that incommoded him.

Meanwhile the hospital became every day more disagreeable to me, and
seeing but one way to get out of it, I endeavored to hasten my abjuration
with as much eagerness as I had hitherto sought to retard it.

The two Africans had been baptised with great ceremony, they were habited
in white from head to foot to signify the purity of their regenerated
souls. My turn came a month after; for all this time was thought
necessary by my directors, that they might have the honor of a difficult
conversion, and every dogma of their faith was recapitulated, in order to
triumph the more completely over my new docility.

At length, sufficiently instructed and disposed to the will of my
masters, I was led in procession to the metropolitan church of St. John,
to make a solemn abjuration, and undergo a ceremony made use of on these
occasions, which, though not baptism, is very similar, and serves to
persuade the people that Protestants are not Christians. I was clothed
in a kind of gray robe, decorated with white Brandenburgs. Two men, one
behind, the other before me, carried copper basins