It is true, an insurrection exhibiting the manifestation of a general and hostile principle against the source of their support, had spread over the country; but, notwithstanding its force and violence, the good that they had done was not forgotten to them in the hour of their trials and their sorrows.

Many a man, for instance, whose voice was loud in the party procession, and from whose lips the shout of "down with the blood-stained tithe!" issued with equal fervor and sincerity, was often known to steal, at the risk of his very life, in the dead hour of night, to the house of, the starving parson and his worn family, and with blackened face, that he might not by any possibility be known, pay the very tithes for whose abolition he was willing to peril his life.

Nay, what is more, the priest himself--the actual living idolatrous priest, the benighted minister of the Scarlet Lady, has often been known to bring, upon his own broad and sturdy shoulders, that relief in substantial food which has saved the lives of more than one of those ungodly parsons, who had fattened upon a heretic church, and were the corrupted supporters of the mammon of unrighteousness.

Here, in fact, was the popish, bigoted priest--the believer in transubstantiation, the denouncer of political enemies, the advocate of exclusive salvation, the fosterer of pious frauds, the "surpliced ruffian," as he has been called, and heaven knows what besides, stealing out at night, loaded like a mule, with provisions for the heretical parson and his family--for the Bible-man, the convent-hunter, the seeker after filthy lucre, and the black slug who devoured one-tenth of the husbandman's labors.

Such, in fact, was the case in numberless instances, where the very priest himself durst not with safety render open assistance to his ecclesiastical enemy, the parson.
In this combination against tithe, it is to be observed, that, as in all other agitations, whether the object be good or otherwise, those who took a principal part among the people in the rural districts were seldom any other than the worst and most unprincipled spirits--reckless ruffians and desperate vagabonds, without any sense of either religious or moral obligation to restrain them from the commission of outrage.
It is those men, unfortunately, who, possessed of strong and licentious energies, and always the most active and contaminating in every agitation that takes place among us, and who, influenced by neither shame nor fear, and regardless of consequences, impress their disgraceful character upon the country at large, and occasion the great body of society to suffer the reproach of that crime and violence which, after all, only comparatively a few commit.
Our friend the proctor, we have already stated, had collected the tithes of three or four parishes; and it is unnecessary, therefore, to say, that the hostility against him was spread over a wide and populous district.