I went to
hear it. He spoke about an hour, and every quotation from the work, and
every reference he made to it, was false. There was not a word of truth
in the whole lecture. There was not a sentence which was not as opposite
to truth and as full of falsehood as he could make it. And the ingenuity
he displayed in his task was marvellous. It was really devilish. He
enlarged my conception of the evil powers of wicked men, in the line of
turning good into evil, and truth into lies, beyond all that I could
otherwise have imagined. He did a hundred things, the least of which my
poor limited capacity would have deemed impossible.
He pursued the same course in the debate. He went as far beyond poor
McCalla, as McCalla had gone beyond ordinary sinners. If I had
undertaken to correct his misrepresentations, and expose his fictions, I
should not have had one moment to give to the subject we were met to
discuss. So I did as I did with McCalla, I rebuked the man with becoming
severity; I contradicted his statements in the plainest and strongest
way I could; I also offered to arrange for a discussion of personal
matters, if he wished it, after we had gone through our discussion of
principles, and engaged to prove every discreditable story he told of me
to be false, and then went on with the discussion.
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