Although these men pass for sages amongst their own people, they were very ignorant, in comparison with well-educated Europeans. One of the sectaries, for instance, maintained against Mr. Martyn, that there was no difference between pleasure and pain; and he was once called upon in a large company, assembled at the house of the prime minister of the territory, to prove that the earth moves: but no one understood his explanations. Sometimes he would be questioned on great principles which naturally led him to speak of the gospel; but as soon as he mentioned any of its doctrines, they would divert the conversation to some of the ridiculous ideas, upon which they were accustomed to waste their thoughts. For instance, one of the men who accompanied him as a guard to visit the ruins of Persepolis, a celebrated ancient city, not far from Shiraz, “often broke a long silence,” he says, “by a sudden question of this sort: ‘Sir, what is the chief good of life?’ I replied, ‘The love of God:’ ‘What next?’ ‘The love of man.’ ‘That is,’ said he, ‘to have men love us, or to love them?’ ‘To love them.’ He did not seem to agree with me. Another time he asked, ‘Who were the worst people in the world?’ I said ‘Those who know their duty, and do not practise it.’ At the house where I was entertained, they asked me the question which the Lord once asked, ‘What think ye of Christ?’ I generally tell them at first, what they expect to hear, ‘The Son of God;’ but this time I said, ‘The same as you say,—the word of God.’ ‘Was he a Prophet?’ ‘Yes, in some sense, he was a Prophet; but, what it chiefly concerns us to know, he was an Atonement for the sins of men.’ Not understanding this, they made no reply. They next asked, ‘What did I think of the soul?’ was it out of the body or in the body? I supposed the latter. ‘No,’ they said, ‘it was neither the one nor the other; but next to it, and the mover of the body.’” We have some other specimens of these discussions.