ABSTRACT
By the title of his novel Jose Rizal meant not that he was touching a person forbidden, but a subject. The words he had found in a Latin version of the New Testament in the passage where the risen Christ is beheld by Mary Magdalene; but he used these words in a sense wholly different from the scriptural significance. Conditions in the Philippines he had thought of as having become a social cancer that persisted first because of a notion that nobody must treat or touch it. A year later with the full approbation of their parents they were betrothed. Mr. Leonora Rivera was fond of his nephew; to the aunt, Jose was at least not objectionable, though she seems to have been a lady of a captious and changeable temperament. Meantime, the Riveras had moved from Manila to Dagupan, in the province then called Laguna. The reputation that Rizal had left behind him was not bettered by the handling.
