1. George Ensor argued that questions of morality and social justice cannot be addressed within a theology of salvation through faith.
20 Facts About George Ensor
1. 2.
In 1783, his mother Sara George Ensor inherited Ardress House, a modest farmhouse in County Armagh, that his father transformed with, amongst other alterations, a facade with false windows to increase the property's apparent size.
3.
George Ensor was educated at George Ensor Dr Murray's school, Dublin, followed by Trinity College Dublin.
4.
George Ensor graduated in 1790 and was called to the Irish Bar in 1792.
5.
George Ensor married Esther Weld on 7 January 1804.
6.
George Ensor was a political pamphleteer, and a prolific correspondent to the press, noted for the sarcasm he employed against the government in Ireland and in Britain.
7.
George Ensor finds Malthus's dogmatic insistence on absolving the rich and the institutions of society of responsibility for poverty "astounding":.
8.
Idleness and negligence, George Ensor argued were as much an effect as a cause of social evils.
9.
George Ensor was not aware "of any nation, which possessing confirmed liberty and equal laws, has become miserable merely by the excess of its people".
10.
George Ensor was among the first Armagh members of the Catholic Association.
11.
In 1828, Daniel O'Connell, the leader of the Catholic Association, debated with Jeremy Bentham allowing George Ensor to stand with O'Connell as a running mate in the Clare by-election.
12.
George Ensor described Ensor as "a man of pure principle and excellent notions", although, "if a Christian at all, certainly not a Catholic", and a radical rather than [as most of O'Connell's Protestant and English friends] a Whig.
13.
George Ensor did join O'Connell in calling for repeal of the Act of Union.
14.
George Ensor argued that questions of morality were themselves "incidental" to a faith in salvation through Jesus Christ.
15.
Unbeliever notwithstanding, George Ensor was engaged as a lawyer by James Warren Doyle, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin.
16.
George Ensor was to investigate reports of hundreds of conversions to the reformed faith on the estate in Cavan of proselytising Orangeman, Lord Farnham.
17.
George Ensor's reports assured the bishop that, such as they were, the conversions were a case of "souperism" and would not survive the then near-famine conditions.
18.
That the Protestant clergy in Ireland should have obstructed "educating socially and religiously all the people in a common school", for George Ensor was further evidence that a religious establishment is "inherently pernicious in all its relations".
19.
George Ensor died on 3 December 1843 at the family home, Ardress House, which is property of the National Trust.
20.
Today a "neglected" figure, George Ensor had sufficient renown in his lifetime for a recent history of Irish thought to class him with his radical contemporaries William Thompson, Thompson's sometime collaborator, the radical feminist Anna Doyle Wheeler, and the holistic philosopher Henry MacCormac.