But the tithe impost was the one most grievously felt, and at last the peasantry resolved to resist it by force.

Nothing could be more violent than the contrasts presented at this time in the social life of Ireland.  On the one side there was a rapid succession of atrocities and tragedies fearful to contemplate:  the bailiffs, constabulary, and military driving away cattle, sheep, pigs, and geese to be sold by public auction, to pay the minister who had no congregation to whom he could preach the gospel; the cattle-prisons or ‘pounds’ surrounded by high walls, but uncovered, wet and dirty, crowded with all sorts of animals, cold and starved, and uttering doleful sounds; the driving away of the animals in the night from one farm to another to avoid seizures; the auctions without bidders, in the midst of groaning and jeering multitudes; the slaughter of policemen, and in some instances of clergymen, with fiendish expressions of hatred and yells of triumph; the mingling of fierce passions with the strongest natural affections; the exultation in murder as if it were a glorious deed of war; the Roman Catholic press and platform almost justifying those deeds of outrage and blood; the mass of the Roman Catholic population sustaining this insurrection against the law with their support and sympathy and prayers, as if it were a holy war, in which the victims were martyrs.  On the other side were presented pictures which excited the deepest interest of the Protestant community throughout the United Kingdom.  We behold the clergyman and his family in the glebe-house, lately the abode of plenty, comfort, and elegance, a model of domestic happiness and gentlemanly life; but the income of the rector fell off, till he was bereft of nearly all his means.  In order to procure the necessaries of life for his family, he was obliged to part with the cows that gave milk for his household, the horse and car, which were necessary in the remote place where his glebe-house was situated, and everything that could be spared, till at length he was obliged to make his greatest sacrifice, and to send his books—­the dear and valued companions of his life—­to Dublin, to be sold by auction.  His boys could no longer be respectably clad, his wife and daughters were obliged to part with their jewellery and all their superfluities.  There was no longer wine or medicine, that the mother was accustomed to dispense kindly and liberally to the poor around her, in their sickness and sorrow, without distinction of creed.

The glebe, which once presented an aspect of so much comfort and ease and affluence, now looked bare and desolate and void of life.  But for the contributions of Christian friends at a distance, many of those once happy little centres of Christian civilisation—­those well-springs of consolation to the afflicted—­must have been abandoned to the overwhelming sand of desolation swept upon them by the hurricane of the anti-tithe agitation.