diced b Jos e S. Arc a, - non

thorough. The family prayed the Rosary every night. When he was sent to aneighboring village for his initial schooling, he heard mass daily, usually atfour o'clock in the morning. Later, at the Ateneo, he received not only solidtraining in the classics and the modern sciences, but he was also "subjected toone of the world's most thorough and gripping systems of indoctrination, theJesuit ratio studiorum, under tight and constant discipline with everyincentive of competition and reward." It was, of course, also the purpose ofthe pious teachers "to make steadfast and lifelong Catholics" out of theirpupils.° This latter intention in Rizal's case, perhaps, was less successful. Hesoon would lose, when he came to Spain, the naive faith of his early youth,expressed for instance in his poems on religious topics. But the teaching ofmorals and discipline imbibed at the Ateneo left a lasting impact on him. Inhis later life they were responsible for his scruples when tackling the problemof violence. He remained a moralist to the end of his days, which made himsometimes a difficult companion for the other Filipinos in Europe. But it alsomade him an honest intellectual who, for convenience's sake, did not ignorequestions or arguments that did not fit into his scheme.3) Painful personal experiences in the colonial setting taught him an earlylesson that rebellion or the use of force by those not in power did not pay.Rizal grew up in an atmosphere where even a family of "principales" and"ilustrados" were helplessly exposed to and victimized by violence. In 1872when still a boy of ten, he heard about the execution of the three "nationalise'priests, Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, from a well-informed witness, his ownolder brother, Paciano, who was at that time staying in the house of Fr. JoseBurgos, the mouth-piece of the Filipino clergy in their fight for equal rightswith the Spanish clergy.". Obviously the priests were not involved in theCavite mutiny for which they were sentenced to death and they became,\subsequently in the eyes of the people, martyrs for a just cause.Shortly thereafter, his own mother, a learned lady whose father hadbeen—in a liberal period in Spain—the representative of the Philippines inthe Spanish Cortes, was arrested. She was marched off to prison in adisgraceful manner and for more than two years kept there on false charges.Rizal himself, when still seventeen years old, was assaulted by an officerof the Glyn Guard, wounded, thrown into jail and threatened with deportationfor no other reason than having failed to doff his hat to the lieutenant whomhe had not even seen in the daik.°All these humiliations deeply hurt the pride of the hypersensitive Rizalwhb excelled in competition against his Spanish classmates. But he wasforced to admit that in the colonial setting might was not restrained by any204