Catholics From Ireland

"Electors of the County Clare! choose between me and Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald; choose between him who has so long cultivated his own interests, and one who seeks only to advance yours; choose between the sworn libeller of the Catholic faith, and one who has devoted his early life to your cause; who has consumed his manhood in a struggle for your liberties, and who has ever lived, and is ready to die for, the integrity, the honour, the purity, of the Catholic faith, and the promotion of Irish freedom and happiness."

"The oath at present required by law is, "That the sacrifice of the mass, and the invocation of the blessed Virgin Mary, and other saints, as now practised in the Church of Rome, are impious and idolatrous." Of course I will never stain my soul with such an oath: I leave that to my honourable opponent, Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald. He has often taken that horrible oath; he is ready to take it again, and asks your votes, to enable him so to swear. I would rather be torn limb from limb than take it... Return me to parliament, and it is probable that such blasphemous oath will be abolished for ever."

"The combination of national action—all Catholic Ireland acting as one man—must necessarily have a powerful effect on the minds of the Ministry and of the entire British nation. A people who can be thus brought to act together, and by one impulse, are too powerful to be neglected and too formidable to be long opposed."

"Our enemies have long duped the people of England—indeed, that was not difficult; so dishonest and besotted a people as the English never lived. (Loud cheers.) Yes; they are dishonest and besotted! Individuals—many individuals, and classes amongst them, I respect and reverence; but as a nation, I must say, and I can prove it, that they are most profligate and quite lost in folly."

"I am most deeply anxious to impress upon the minds and understandings of every true Irishman, that disloyalty to his sovereign would be double treason to his country; it would be perjury, aggravated by folly, and followed by the eternal extinction of the liberties of Ireland. And what prospect could there possibly be of aught besides destruction? ... For myself, I will tell you honestly, that if ever that fatal day arrive, you will find me arrayed against you. There will not be so heavy a heart; but there will not be a more ready hand to sustain the constitution against every enemy!"

"Ireland lay in torpor till roused by the call for religious liberty. She would, I fear and I am convinced, have relapsed into apathy if liberty of conscience had been speedily conceded. Let them delay Emancipation but yet a little while, and they will find that they have roused the sleeping lion of Ireland to awaking activity, which will not permit our further slumber till Ireland is herself again. (Loud applause.)"

"Next, your enemies accuse me of a desire for the independence of Ireland. I admit the charge, and let them make the most of it. I have seen Ireland a kingdom; I reproach myself with having lived to behold her a province! Yes, I confess it—I will ever be candid upon the subject—I have an ulterior object—The Repeal of the Union, and the restoration to Old Ireland of her Independence. (Loud and repeated cheering, and acclamations for several minutes.)"

"Your enemies say—and let them say it—that I wish for a separation between England and Ireland. The charge is false; it is, to use a modern quotation, as "false as hell!" And the men who originated, and those who seek to inculcate it, know it to be a falsehood. There lives not a man less desirous of a separation between the two countries—there lives not a man more deeply convinced, that the connection between them, established upon the basis of one king and separate parliaments, would be of the utmost value to the peace and happiness of both countries, and to the liberties of the civilized world."

"Recollect...that...you were certain of having, as president of this commission, that ludicrous enemy of ours, who has got, in jest, the names he deserves in good earnest, of "Orange Peel." (Hear, hear.) A raw youth, squeezed out of the workings of I know not what factory in England, who began his parliamentary career by vindicating the gratuitous destruction of our brave soldiers in the murderous expedition to Walcheren, and was sent over here before he got rid of the foppery of perfumed handkerchiefs and thin shoes, upon the ground, I suppose, that he had given a specimen of his talents for vindication, that might be useful to the present and future administrations of Ireland; in short, that he was a lad ready to vindicate anything—everything!"

"My days – the blossom of my youth and the flower of my manhood – have been darkened by the dreariness of servitude. In this my native land – in the land of my sires – I am degraded without fault as an alien and an outcast."

"Let us then, my beloved countrymen, sacrifice our wicked and groundless animosities on the altar of our country...let us rally round the standard of Old Ireland, and we shall easily procure that greatest of political blessings, an Irish King, an Irish House of Lords, and an Irish House of Commons."

"Intention appears to be something that we can express, but which brutes (which e.g. do not give orders) can have, though lacking any distinct expression of intention. For a cat's movements in stalking a bird are hardly to be called an expression of intention. One might as well call a car's stalling the expression of its being about to stop. Intention is unlike emotion in this respect, that the expression of it is purely conventional; we might say 'linguistic', if we will allow certain bodily movements with a conventional meaning to be included in language."

"The trouble about the Christian standard of chastity is that it isn't and never has been generally lived by; not that it would be profitless if it were. Quite the contrary: it would be colossally productive of earthly happiness. All the same it is a virtue, not like temperance in eating and drinking, not like honesty about property, for these have a purely utilitarian justification. But it, like the respect for life, is a supra-utilitarian value, connected with the substance of life, and this is what comes out in the perception that the life of lust is one in which we dishonour our bodies. Implicitly, lasciviousness is over and over again treated as hateful, even by those who would dislike such an explicit judgment on it. Just listen, witness the scurrility when it's hinted at; disgust when it's portrayed as the stuff of life; shame when it's exposed, the leer of complicity when it's approved. You don't get these attitudes with everybody all of the time; but you do get them with everybody. (It's much too hard work to keep up the façade of the Playboy philosophy, according to which all this is just an unfortunate mistake, to be replaced by healthy-minded wholehearted praise of sexual fun.)"

"You can argue truly enough, for example, that general respect for the prohibition on murder makes life more commodious. If people really respect the prohibition against murder life is pleasanter for all of us - but this argument is exceedingly comic. Because utility presupposes the life of those who are to be convenienced, and everybody perceives quite clearly that the wrong done in murder is done first and foremost to the victim, whose life is not inconvenienced, it just isn't there any more. He isn't there to complain; so the utilitarian argument has to be on behalf of the rest of us. Therefore, though true, it is highly comic and is not the foundation: the objection to murder is supra-utilitarian."

"Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow. At any rate the talk that reflects and commends this attitude is always shallow. They dishonour their own bodies; holding cheap what is naturally connected with the origination of human life."

"Christian life meant a separation from the standards of that world: you couldn't be a Baal-worshipper, you couldn't sacrifice to idols, be a sodomite, practice infanticide, compatibly with the Christian allegiance. That is not to say that Christians were good; we humans are a bad lot and our lives as Christians even if not blackly and grossly wicked are usually very mediocre."

"The denial of any distinction between foreseen and intended consequences, as far as responsibility is concerned, was not made by Sidgwick in developing any one 'method of ethics'; he made this important move on behalf of everybody and just on its own account; and I think it plausible to suggest that this move on the part of Sidgwick explains the difference between old-fashioned Utilitarianism and the consequentialism, as I name it, which marks him and every English academic moral philosopher since him."

"There is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act; everyone knows this. Contrast sex with eating - you're strolling along a lane, you see a mushroom on a bank as you pass by, you know about mushrooms, you pick it and you eat it quite casually - sex is never like that. That's why virtue in connection with eating is basically a matter only of the pattern of one's eating habits. But virtue in sex - chastity - is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives. A single sexual action can be bad even without regard to its context, its further intentions and its motives."

"But we lay people are not less called to the Christian life, in which the critical question is: "Where does the compass-needle of your mind and will point?" This is tested above all by our reactions when it costs or threatens to cost something to be a Christian. One should be glad if it does, rather than complain! If we will not let it cost anything; if we succumb to the threat of "losing our life", then our religion is indistinguishable from pure worldliness."

"If a kind of love cannot be commanded, we can't build our moral theology of marriage on the presumption that it will be present. Its absence is sad, but this sadness exists, it is very common. We should avoid, I think, using the indicative mood for what is really a commandment like the Scout Law ("A Boy Scout is kind to animals" - it means a Boy Scout ought to be kind to animals). For if we hear: "a Christian couple grow in grace and love together" doesn't the question arise "supposing they don't?" It clears the air to substitute the bite of what is clearly a precept for the sweetness of a rosy picture. The command to a Christian couple is: "Grow in grace and love together." But a joint command can only be jointly obeyed. Suppose it isn't? Well, there remains the separate precept to each and in an irremediably unhappy marriage, one ought still to love the other, though not perhaps feeling the affection that cannot be commanded. Thus the notion of the "marriage debt" is a very necessary one, and it alone is realistic: because it makes no assumption as to the state of the affections. Looking at the rightness of the marriage act like this will help in another way. It will prevent us from assuming that the pleasant affection which exists between a happy and congenial pair is the fulfilment of the precept of love. (It may after all only be a complacent hiving off together in a narrow love.) We ought absolutely not to give out a teaching which is flattering to the lucky, and irrelevant to the unhappy. Looked at carefully, too, such teaching is altogether too rigorist in a new direction. People who are not quite happily married, not lucky in their married life, but nevertheless have a loyalty to the bond, are not, therefore, bound to abstain from intercourse."

"A severe morality holds that intercourse (and may hold this of eating, too) has something wrong about it if it is ever done except explicitly as being required for that preservation of human life which is what makes intercourse a good kind of action. But this involves thoroughly faulty moral psychology. God gave us our physical appetite, and its arousal without our calculation is part of the working of our sort of life. Given moderation and right circumstances, acts prompted by inclination can be taken in a general way to accomplish what makes them good in kind and there's no need for them to be individually necessary or useful for the end that makes them good kinds of action. Intercourse is a normal part of married life through the whole life of the partners in a marriage and is normally engaged in without any distinct purpose other than to have it, just as such a part of married life."