Meantime his fate was crying out to him in strange voices that led him, before he was aware, into the road from the Philippines. At the Ateneo the students were fond of enacting plays of their own devising. Rizal was poet and dramatist; here was the plain call to his favorite pursuit. He wrote for his fellows a metrical drama called “Beside the Pasig,” and on December 8, 1880, it was publicly performed by one of the student societies. Courage he had never lacked, the courage of a mind too reasonable to be deluded by fear. He showed now what he had in his heart. One of the characters in his drama was the devil himself. Into the mouth of Sathanas he put (with a dazzling audacity) a sentence denouncing Spain and her policy toward the Philippines. There are single colorations of character that sometimes reveal and illuminate the whole man. This was one of them. Disclosed here was a certain precise, firm touch of workmanship as typical as was the pluck demanded to say such a thing. The perfect barbing of the satirical arrow no Philippine audience could miss; Spain so bad that the devil himself condemned her! Nothing could be more poisonous. But among the persons whose attention was enchained by the daring flight of fancy were members of the Government’s secret service. To keep watch against such young enthusiasts tempted to raillery upon the existing order was a chief point in their varied and malign industry, and in this instance the author of these burning thoughts was no stranger to them. Even if the bold iconoclast had never shocked right-minded people by calling the Philippines his fatherland, he must have been from the first an object of suspicion to the souls that could find sedition in the drooping of an eyebrow. Brother of Paciano Rizal, son of Francisco Rizal Mercado, should aught but evil come of that stock? To these ferrets, his outbreaks in verse must have been no more than the fulfilment of prophecy. Then, again, Rizal did not like Santo Tomas. He was galled to think that its methods of instruction lagged behind those of the Ateneo, which it should have led. He knew well enough that the cold frown of hostility was turned upon him by the friar professors. Santo Tomas was Dominican; the Ateneo was Jesuit. In Rizal’s case jealousy between the two orders was added to the heavy handicap he must pay as a reputed insurgent against the System. The Jesuits had sent forth this prize-winning prodigy. Logically, then, the other orders were constrained to sniff at him.