ed part of his time as a compositor in order to defray
his expenses while he continued his studies. A limited edition was
published through the financial aid extended by a Filipino associate,
and sent to Hongkong, thence to be surreptitiously introduced into
the Philippines.

_Noli Me Tangere_ ("Touch Me Not") at the time the work was written had
a peculiar fitness as a title. Not only was there an apt suggestion
of a comparison with the common flower of that name, but the term
is also applied in pathology to a malignant cancer which affects
every bone and tissue in the body, and that this latter was in the
author's mind would appear from the dedication and from the summing-up
of the Philippine situation in the final conversation between Ibarra
and Elias. But in a letter written to a friend in Paris at the time,
the author himself says that it was taken from the Gospel scene where
the risen Savior appears to the Magdalene, to whom He addresses these
words, a scene that has been the subject of several notable paintings.

In this connection it is interesting to note what he himself thought of
the work, and his frank statement of what he had tried to accomplish,
made just as he was publishing it: "_Noli Me Tangere_, an expression
taken from the Gospel of St. Luke, [7] means _touch me not_. The
book contains things of which no one up to the present time has
spoken, for they are so sensitive that they have never suffered
themselves to be touched by any one whomsoever. For my own part, I
have attempted to do what no one else has been willing to do: I have
dared to answer the calumnies that have for centuries been heaped
upon us and our country. I have written of the social condition and
the life, of our beliefs, our hopes, our longings, our complaints,
and our sorrows; I have unmasked the hypocrisy which, under the cloak
of religion, has come among us to impoverish and to brutalize us,
I have distinguished the true religion from the false, from the
superstition that traffics with the holy word to get money and to
make us believe in absurdities for which Catholicism would blush,
if ever it knew of them. I have unveiled that which has been hidden
behind the deceptive and dazzling words of our governments. I have
told our countrymen of our mistakes, our vices, our faults, and our
weak complaisance with our miseries there. Where I have found virtue I
have spoken of it highly in order to render it homage; and if I have
not wept