"Yet he considered it his duty to destroy idol worship, and wrote how he had destroyed idols in a prominent goddess temple. The Hindus were described as ‘being deeply affected with the sight so foppish a set of Gods’, and he proudly ‘threw some down to the ground, and striking off the heads of others’. He wanted to demonstrate to the ‘deluded’ Hindus that ‘their images were nothing but impotent and still idols, unable to protect themselves and much less their worshippers’. The most remarkable part of this incident was that the Hindus who gathered at the scene of destruction were agitated, but did not allow their agitation to turn violent. One man he described as a ‘pagan school teacher (upadhyayan )’ calmly entered into a theological debate and proceeded to show the missionary the folly of his actions. He concluded the debate by pointing out to the missionary that from the point of view of absolute being, all forms of matter are constructions of Maya, and that the pottery images the missionary broke were merely symbols."