"Tell him Elias, if he lives, will keep his word," replied the helmsman sadly. "And when will you join us?" "When your captain thinks the hour has come." "That is well; adieu!" "If I live!" repeated Elias, under his breath. XLIII. IL BUON DI SI CONOSCE DA MATTINA. While Ibarra and Elias were on the lake, old Tasio, ill in his solitary little house, and Don Filipo, who had come to see him, were also talking of the country. For several days the old philosopher, or fool--as you find him--prostrated by a rapidly increasing feebleness, had not left his bed. "The country," he was saying to Don Filipo, "isn't what it was twenty years ago." "Do you think so?" "Don't you see it?" asked the old man, sitting up. "Ah! you did not know the past. Hear the students of to-day talking. New names are spoken under the arches that once heard only those of Saint Thomas, Suarez, Amat, and the other idols of my day. In vain the monks cry from the chair against the demoralization of the times; in vain the convents extend their ramifications to strangle the new ideas. The roots of a tree may influence the parasites growing on it, but they are powerless against the bird, which, from the branches, mounts triumphant toward the sky!" The old man spoke with animation, and his eye shone. "And yet the new germ is very feeble," said the lieutenant. "If they all set about it, the progress already so dearly paid for may yet be choked." "Choke it? Who? The weak dwarf, man, to choke progress, the powerful child of time and energy? When has he done that? He has tried dogma, the scaffold, and the stake, but E pur si muove is the device of progress. Wills are thwarted, individuals sacrificed. What does that mean to progress? She goes her way, and the blood of those who fall enriches the soil whence spring her new shoots. The Dominicans themselves do not escape this law, and they are beginning to imitate the Jesuits, their irreconcilable enemies." "Do you hold that the Jesuits move with progress?" asked the astonished Don Filipo. "Then why are they so attacked in Europe?" "I reply as did once an ecclesiastic of old," said the philosopher, laying his head back on the pillow and putting on his mocking air, "that there are three ways of moving with progress: ahead, beside, behind; the first guide, the second follow, the third are dragged. The Jesuits are of these last. At present, in the Philippines, we are about three centuries behind the van of the general movement. The Jesuits, who in Europe are the reaction, viewed from here represent progress. For instance, the Philippines owe to them the introduction of the natural sciences, the soul of the nineteenth century. As for ourselves, at this moment we are entering a period of strife: strife between the past which grapples to itself the tumbling feudal castle, and the future whose song may be heard afar off, bringing us from distant lands the tidings of good news."