nged
to another epoch, another generation, when the better young men were
not afraid to risk their dignity by becoming priests, when the native
clergy looked any friar at all in the face, and when their class,
not yet degraded and vilified, called for free men and not slaves,
superior intelligences and not servile wills. In his sad and serious
features was to be read the serenity of a soul fortified by study and
meditation, perhaps tried out by deep moral suffering. This priest
was Padre Florentino, Isagani's uncle, and his story is easily told.

Scion of a wealthy and influential family of Manila, of agreeable
appearance and cheerful disposition, suited to shine in the world, he
had never felt any call to the sacerdotal profession, but by reason
of some promises or vows, his mother, after not a few struggles and
violent disputes, compelled him to enter the seminary. She was a great
friend of the Archbishop, had a will of iron, and was as inexorable
as is every devout woman who believes that she is interpreting the
will of God. Vainly the young Florentine offered resistance, vainly he
begged, vainly he pleaded his love affairs, even provoking scandals:
priest he had to become at twenty-five years of age, and priest he
became. The Archbishop ordained him, his first mass was celebrated
with great pomp, three days were given over to feasting, and his
mother died happy and content, leaving him all her fortune.

But in that struggle Florentine received a wound from which he
never recovered. Weeks before his first mass the woman he loved,
in desperation, married a nobody--a blow the rudest he had ever
experienced. He lost his moral energy, life became dull and
insupportable. If not his virtue and the respect for his office,
that unfortunate love affair saved him from the depths into which the
regular orders and secular clergymen both fall in the Philippines. He
devoted himself to his parishioners as a duty, and by inclination to
the natural sciences.

When the events of seventy-two occurred, [9] he feared that the
large income his curacy yielded him would attract attention to
him, so, desiring peace above everything, he sought and secured his
release, living thereafter as a private individual on his patrimonial
estate situated on the Pacific coast. He there adopted his nephew,
Isagani, who was reported by the malicious to be his own son by his
old sweetheart when she became a widow, and by the more serious and
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