Leaving his home as an outcast rather than submit to the carnal marriage tie, Dayananda spent sixteen years of youth and early manhood in walking from one holy place of Northern India to another. Sometimes he passed into Kashmir, thrice he crossed the snow mountains into Thibet, and, hungry for wisdom, he sought everywhere for the teacher at whose feet he might enjoy it. At last he found wisdom near at hand, in those very scriptures on which he had meditated day and night, and full of reforming zeal he turned to Benares and other seats of religious learning where he might confute the Pundits, whose obscure minds darkened the hard radiance of God’s Sanscrit word. In city after city public debates were held before immense audiences, Dayananda in solitary knowledge opposing the priestly hostility of all the teachers combined, while as a rule, the local representative of the British Empire was invited to take the chair and see fair play, or award the prize in subtleties of theological controversy. The latter was a task for which our public-school education does not specially adapt us, but as a rule the British representative was spared the difficulty of metaphysical decision by the Pundits themselves, who violently broke up the meeting under consciousness of defeat. Perhaps unhappily for his cause, Dayananda did not confine himself to the purgation of Hindu superstitions and social abuses, but was equally vehement in his attacks upon the unworthy additions and compromises that have gathered round Christianity and Islam; and to his success in interrupting the process of conversion among Hindus we may trace the marked hostility with which Christian and Mohammedan missionaries have always regarded the Samaj.[62]