“So then I am now working to the end that the children become changed into parrots and know by heart so many things of which they do not understand a word.” It is doubtless a perfect picture of education in the Philippines and outlines the size of the task that Rizal had shouldered. [75] “Let us not be so pessimistic,” said Ibarra. He resolves to build and endow for the town a modern school-house. As the time comes for the laying of the corner-stone, at which ceremony he is to officiate, he receives a mysterious warning that an attempt will be made upon his life. This he seemingly disregards; and yet, when he must descend into the trench and stand beneath the corner-stone suspended from the scaffold, he looks anxiously above him, watches the apparatus, and is tense for a leap. There is a sound of cracking timber; in an instant the great stone falls, but he has sprung aside and saved his life. At the dinner with which the day’s ceremonials are concluded, Padre Damaso is a conspicuous guest. Not even yet is Ibarra, despite certain intimations, aware that Damaso was his father’s remorseless enemy, that the gloomy, vindictive friar had put forth the hidden powers of the orders and dragged his father to death. But at the dinner Damaso, stung with baffled hate because Ibarra has escaped the gin so cunningly spread for his life, loses all self-control and utters against Ibarra’s father an insult no son could be expected to endure. Ibarra springs at his throat, knocks him down, and stands glowering over him. In the eyes of the petrified spectators murder is about to be done, when Maria Clara, Capitán Tiago’s reputed daughter, throws herself between the infuriated youth and the prostrate friar. Maria Clara is Ibarra’s sweetheart. She pleads with him with her eyes, and he recovers enough self-command to take himself away. But the assault upon the friar is his ruin. He has committed the unpardonable sin, the blackest crime in the calendar: he has laid “violent hand upon a friar, representative at once in his own person of the might of the church and the majesty of the realm.” That day he is excommunicated, a punishment that in the Philippines, nineteenth century, retained all the poignancy it had in Darkest Europe, 1000 A.D. He has become a moral leper.