As an antidote to the recent Church of England debacle involving St Paul’s Cathedral and Occupy, it seems apposite to examine a bishop who did much for the Church: J C Ryle.

John Charles Ryle was born in 1816 to a wealthy banker.  Having attended Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, his family expected him to pursue a career in politics.  However, Ryle felt called to the priesthood and was ordained in 1842.

He was very much an evangelical preacher, firmly opposed to the Ritualism in the Church as characterised by the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement of the time. Although he had firm religious convictions which he expressed in no uncertain terms, in private, he was known for his kindness and warmth.  He also preached to the working class, bringing many to the knowledge and love of Christ Jesus.

One of Benjamin Disraeli’s last acts as Prime Minister was to appoint Ryle to the post of Bishop of Liverpool, a brand new diocese.  There, Ryle presided over the construction of 40 new churches, raised clergy salaries and instituted pension funds for them. He was also responsible for the building of the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool.

Ryle retired only three months before he died at age 83 in 1900. Today, he appears to have more of a following in the United States among orthodox Protestants than he does here in England.  He published several works on the four Gospels as well as on the Christian life.

(Incidentally, Ryle’s second son, Herbert Edward Ryle, served as Bishop of Exeter, then Bishop of Winchester before being appointed Dean of Westminster in 1911.)

Below are several quotations from J C Ryle’s works, still as relevant today as they were in Victorian times. (Thanks to Grace Gems and Bible Bulletin Board [here and here]).

Would that we had priests and bishops like this today.

My chief desire in all my writings, is to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ and make Him beautiful and glorious in the eyes of men; and to promote the increase of repentance, faith, and holiness upon earth.

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Every professing Christian is the soldier of Christ. He is bound by his baptism to fight Christ’s battle against sin, the world, and the devil. The man that does not do this, breaks his vow: he is a spiritual defaulter; he does not fulfil the engagement made for him. The man that does not do this, is practically renouncing his Christianity. The very fact that he belongs to a Church, attends a Christian place of worship, and calls himself a Christian, is a public declaration that he desires to be reckoned a soldier of Jesus Christ.

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“What is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18)   A subject stands out on the face of this text which is one of the most solemn and heart searching in the Bible. That subject is eternity.  The subject is one of which the wisest man can only take in a little at a time. We have no eyes to see it fully, and no mind to grasp it; and yet we must not refuse to consider it. There is a depth of stars in the heavens above us, which the most powerful telescope cannot pierce; yet it is well worth it to look into them and learn something, even if we cannot learn everything. There are heights and depths about the subject of eternity which mortal man can never comprehend; but God has spoken of it, and we have no right to turn away from it completely.

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There is no doctrine in Christianity so important as the doctrine of Christ crucified. There is none which the devil tries so hard to destroy. There is none which it is so needful for our own peace to understand. By “Christ crucified,” I mean the doctrine that Christ suffered death on the cross to make atonement for our sins,-that by His death He made a full, perfect, and complete satisfaction to God for the ungodly,-and that through the merits of that death all who believe in Him are forgiven all their sins, however many and great, entirely, and forever.

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If you are a thoughtless, careless man about your soul … Faith and assurance are mere names and words to you: they are neither land, nor money, nor horses, nor dress, nor meat, nor drink: … you care not for them. Alas, poor soul! I mourn over you. The day will come when you will think differently.

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My simple object is to point out the unreasonableness, not to say dishonesty, of ignoring the enormous results and effects which Christianity has produced in the world. I ask the skeptic and the agnostic to try Christianity by its fruits. I defy them to deny the existence of those fruits. I say that mankind owes a huge debt to Christianity, whether mankind knows it or not, of which the amount can never be calculated. In short, the fruits of Christianity are an unanswerable proof to my own mind of its Divine origin, and a stupendous difficulty in the way of infidelity, which has never been fairly grappled with or explained away. 

Ryle’s sermons are available in full at the Bible Bulletin Board links above.  They are beautifully written and ever edifying.