But Padre Fernandez was completely mistaken; the Jesuits repudiated Isagani [58] when that afternoon they learned that he had been arrested, saying that he would compromise them.  “That young man has thrown himself away, he’s going to do us harm!  Let it be understood that he didn’t get those ideas here.”

Nor were the Jesuits wrong.  No!  Those ideas come only from God through the medium of Nature.

CHAPTER XXVIII

TATAKUT

With prophetic inspiration Ben-Zayb had been for some days past maintaining in his newspaper that education was disastrous, very disastrous for the Philippine Islands, and now in view of the events of that Friday of pasquinades, the writer crowed and chanted his triumph, leaving belittled and overwhelmed his adversary Horatius, who in the Pirotecnia had dared to ridicule him in the following manner: 

    From our contemporary, El Grito: 

    “Education is disastrous, very disastrous, for the Philippine
    Islands.”

    Admitted.

    For some time El Grito has pretended to represent the
    Filipino people—­ergo, as Fray Ibanez would say, if he
    knew Latin.

    But Fray Ibanez turns Mussulman when he writes, and we know
    how the Mussulmans dealt with education. In witness whereof,
    as a royal preacher said, the Alexandrian library!

Now he was right, he, Ben-Zayb!  He was the only one in the islands who thought, the only one who foresaw events!

Truly, the news that seditious pasquinades had been found on the doors of the University not only took away the appetite from many and disturbed the digestion of others, but it even rendered the phlegmatic Chinese uneasy, so that they no longer dared to sit in their shops with one leg drawn up as usual, from fear of losing time in extending it in order to put themselves into flight.  At eight o’clock in the morning, although the sun continued on its course and his Excellency, the Captain-General, did not appear at the head of his victorious cohorts, still the excitement had increased.  The friars who were accustomed to frequent Quiroga’s bazaar did not put in their appearance, and this symptom presaged terrific cataclysms.  If the sun had risen a square and the saints appeared only in pantaloons, Quiroga would not have been so greatly alarmed, for he would have taken the sun for a gaming-table and the sacred images for gamblers who had lost their camisas, but for the friars not to come, precisely when some novelties had just arrived for them!