48. Not much later, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Cossacks openly took up arms against Poland. Then the hatred of those who opposed religious unity became ever stronger and more violent; they were convinced that the introduction of this union was the cause of all the calamities and evils that had befallen them; they were determined therefore to use every way and means to cast it down and destroy it. There resulted almost innumerable wrongs to the Catholic Church of the Ruthenians; many churches were profaned, pillaged, demolished, and their furnishing and property destroyed. Not a few of the clergy and a great number of the faithful were severely flogged, terribly tortured, most cruelly done to death. Even the bishops themselves were despoiled of their goods, ejected from their sees and forced to flee. However, even amid the raging of this storm, their spirit did not fail; they did everything possible for the protection and safe-keeping of the flocks entrusted to them, and, more than that, in their dire straits they exerted every effort, by prayer and argument and labor, to bring the whole Russian Church with the tsar Alexis into the unity of the fold.