While he was yet in the university, Rizal came into contact with another influence that affected both his career and the story of his country. He became a freemason. Upon all secret societies, but especially upon the freemasons, the governing class in the Philippines had scowled implacably; the friars and the church generally being still more hostile. The governing class in its jumpy way believed that any kind of secret organization must signify treason; the Civil Guards objected because here were keyholes at which one could not watch; the friars thought freemasonry threatened the economic welfare of the church. By these, Rizal’s religious convictions were gravely doubted, but need not have been since they were easily ascertained. He was of a broad and sweet faith and a charitable practice, cherishing a universal tolerance refreshing to encounter, but he was in the substance of his belief a loyal Catholic. In his father’s house he had been accustomed to hear religious questions discussed without the least restraint; [64] within those walls Francisco Mercado would have freedom of speech if it existed nowhere else in Filipinas. From such discussions he had learned that religion was a matter about which men would differ widely and yet without just reproach; the independent, courageous, and conscientious man would decide for himself. When he came to understand the subjugation of his country and the part played in that great wrong by the monastic orders his faith in the organized church as the custodian of men’s minds and thinkings faded out, but not his faith in the essentials of the Christian religion, from which he seems never to have wandered. At the suggestion that freemasonry was or could be a foe to religion he scoffed. Not only did he accept masonry for himself but he resolved that upon his return to the Philippines he would further it among his countrymen. He may have loved it for the enemies it had made; he would have been scarcely human if he had not felt some such impulse. But beyond all such considerations he must have found in the ritual something of beauty and in the associations something of the calm and fortitude for which the sorely tried soul yearned within him. We are to remember here again that he was one carried by fate and the stress of conditions out of his inclinings. He had the soul of an artist; by sheer force of will he put himself down into an arena of strife. He loved the cloister, books, and meditation; he forced himself to battle with primitive men for primitive rights. He was a poet, with an ear peculiarly sensitive to sweet sounds, a soul on fire about beauty and its recompenses; and he turned his back upon all these because he thought he heard a call to duty. Some men give their lives to a great cause; some men give still more.