He was ordinarily so calm, so self-contained, so much the example of the reasoning man and the like, that it seems highly incongruous to think of him as a duelist; yet twice he challenged to mortal combat. It appears that under his coolly borne exterior there was fire, and even his beautiful faith in the supremacy of reason had not eradicated all the Old Adam from his blood. He seems never to have thought that the violence he contemplated was nothing but a minute specimen of the war-making he denounced, nor that in sending challenges he reverted from his most cherished doctrines. Perhaps if the inconsistency had been pointed out to him then it would not have disturbed him, and certainly it is a hobgoblin that need not disturb us now. If the queer bundle of nerves that is called man never presented a greater irrelevancy, admiration for him need molt no feather. Both of the quarrels, if so they might be called, that brought out the fighting instinct in the gentle artist-student resulted from incidents in Madrid when he returned there in 1890. W. E. Retana, who had been press-agent in Manila for the friars, was now a Madrid journalist and printed in his newspaper a vicious and baseless attack upon Rizal wherein he sought, doubtless, to revenge the friars on the author of “Noli Me Tangere.” Without delay Rizal sent him a challenge. Mr. Retana seems to have had no appetite to go afield; he published a retraction and apology and the quarrel ended. [147] Rather oddly, Retana, who had been in Manila the bitter foe of the Filipino cause and of all its champions (though possibly on a commercial basis), became, after this incident, first the friend and then the biographer of Rizal. The other altercation was with Antonio Luna, [148] afterward a famous commander in the army of the Philippine Republic. About a woman of Rizal’s acquaintance Luna made an unworthy remark, and Rizal sent him a challenge. Having possibly regained sobriety meanwhile, Luna withdrew the remark and apologized for it, whereupon the quarrel was made up without mortal arbitrament. In his chivalrous and unsullied attitude toward women Rizal was true to the finest traditions of his race. Among the faults of the Filipinos, lechery is assuredly not included. Except the Irish, no other people on earth have a higher conception of chastity and sex morality, nor adhere to it with greater tenacity. Retana wrote that Rizal had “a truly upright moral sense.” It was but an inadequate tribute. He was a champion of righteousness; his religion was like Wendell Phillips’s, “a battle not a dream.” When he wrote, “The good of my country, that is all I pursue,” he was not making platform epigrams but telling what the records confirm.