ocession, 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; a