pragmatical "scientific" analyses, and sneering half-truths to a story
pulsating with life, presenting the Filipino as a human being, with
his virtues and his vices, his loves and hates, his hopes and fears.

The publication of Noli Me Tangere suggests the reflection that
the story of Achilles' heel is a myth only in form. The belief that
any institution, system, organization, or arrangement has reached
an absolute form is about as far as human folly can go. The friar
orders looked upon themselves as the sum of human achievement in
man-driving and God-persuading, divinely appointed to rule, fixed
in their power, far above suspicion. Yet they were obsessed by the
sensitive, covert dread of exposure that ever lurks spectrally under
pharisaism's specious robe, so when there appeared this work of a
"miserable Indian," who dared to portray them and the conditions that
their control produced exactly as they were--for the indefinable
touch by which the author gives an air of unimpeachable veracity to
his story is perhaps its greatest artistic merit--the effect upon
the mercurial Spanish temperament was, to say the least, electric. The
very audacity of the thing left the friars breathless.

A committee of learned doctors from Santo Tomas, who were appointed
to examine the work, unmercifully scored it as attacking everything
from the state religion to the integrity of the Spanish dominions,
so the circulation of it in the Philippines was, of course, strictly
prohibited, which naturally made the demand for it greater. Large
sums were paid for single copies, of which, it might be remarked in
passing, the author himself received scarcely any part; collections
have ever had a curious habit of going astray in the Philippines.

Although the possession of a copy by a Filipino usually meant summary