But this was not all; whilst Destitution of the severest kind had impressed on that venerable countenance the melancholy exponent of her presence, Religion had also blended with it that beautiful manifestation of her unshaken trust in God; of patience, meekness, and a disposition to receive at his hands the severest dispensations of life, with a spirit of cheerful humility and resignation.

Take a cursory glance at his face, and there, no doubt, you saw at once that sorrow and suffering lay.
Look, however, a little longer; observe the benign serenity of that clear and cloudless eye; mark the patient sweetness of that firm and well-formed mouth, and the character of heroic tranquility that pervades his whole person, and sanctifies his sorrows, until they fill the heart of the spectator with reverence and sympathy, and his mind with a sense of the dignity, not to say sublimity, which religion can bestow upon human suffering, in which it may almost be said that the creature gains a loving triumph over the Creator himself.
Every one knows that, in general, the clergy of Ireland, as a class, lived from hand to mouth, and that the men who suffered most during the period of which we write were those whose livings were of moderate income.

The favored individuals, who enjoyed the rich and larger incumbencies, the calamity did not reach, or if it did, only in a slighter degree, and with but comparatively little effect.

The cessation, therefore, of only one year's income to those who had no other source of support on which to depend, was dreadful.

In many instances, however, their tithes had been refused for two, and, in some localities, for nearly three years, although the opposition to the payment had not for such a length of time assumed the fierce and implacable spirit which had characterized it during the last twelve months.