J. C. Ryle Biography, Books, and Sermons

John Charles Ryle was born on 10 May 1816 at Macclesfield, in Cheshire, into wealth and expectation. His father was a private banker and Member of Parliament, and the family fortune, drawn from the silk mills of the Industrial Revolution, made the Ryles one of the leading houses of the county. The boy grew up with every earthly advantage: an estate, a name, and the settled assumption that he would one day take his place among the great men of England. He went to Eton, and then to Christ Church, Oxford, where he was as much an athlete as a scholar — he captained the cricket eleven and took ten wickets in the University match at Lord's — and where he crowned it all with a first-class degree in Classics in 1837. A college fellowship was offered him. A seat in Parliament seemed only a matter of time.

Then two things happened that turned the whole course of his life.

Grace, and ruin

The first was his conversion. It came, so far as he could ever fix it, in 1837, in the middle of his Oxford years and a season of serious illness. The account he told in later life fastened on a single Sunday. He had wandered into a parish church where the second lesson was being read from the second chapter of Ephesians, and the reader — a stranger whose name Ryle never learned, in a church he could never afterwards name — came to the eighth verse and read it slowly, with deliberate, emphatic pauses: “For by grace — are ye saved — through faith — and that not of yourselves — it is the gift of God.” The words went home and stayed. Ryle would say he could remember neither the church, nor the man, nor a word of any sermon — only that verse, broken into pieces and pressed one clause at a time upon his heart. Whether it was one dramatic morning or, as his careful biographers reckon, a work spread across that whole year of reading and counsel, the text and the truth were the same: salvation is a gift, and he had received it. From that grace he never moved for the rest of his long life.

The second thing was ruin. In 1841 his father's bank failed, catastrophically and without warning, and the family fortune was swept away in a day. Ryle never softened the memory of it. “We got up one summer's morning with all the world before us as usual,” he wrote, “and went to bed that night completely and entirely ruined.” He called it the blackest chapter of his life. The estate, the wealth, the expected career in politics — all of it was gone, and a young man raised to command found every door shut but one. He was ordained that same year, and he said so with disarming honesty: “I became a clergyman because I felt shut up to do it, and saw no other course of life open to me.”

It is one of the quiet ironies of his story that the disaster which looked like the end of everything was the making of him. Had the bank held, England might have gained another wealthy politician and lost one of the plainest gospel preachers it ever produced.

A country parson's plain words

The ordained man went not to a cathedral but to obscurity — a curacy at Exbury in Hampshire, then the rectory of St Thomas's, Winchester, then Helmingham, and for nearly twenty years the vicarage of Stradbroke in rural Suffolk. These were years of private grief as well as country labour. He married and was widowed, married again and was widowed again; his third wife, Henrietta, was a long invalid whom he nursed for years before her own death in 1889. The man who wrote so plainly about comfort in affliction had earned the right to: he had lost his fortune, buried wives, and learned in a village parsonage what the great world never taught him. And in those country parishes he discovered the gift that would outlast him: he could speak to ordinary people in words they could not fail to understand. He set himself to write plain gospel tracts — short, direct, unadorned, aimed at the farm labourer and the shopkeeper as much as the squire — and they went out by the million, translated into a dozen languages and more, carrying the same clear message he had found in Ephesians 2. He had learned that a truth stated simply is not a truth made shallow, and that the labourer at the back of the church deserved to understand as well as the gentleman in the front pew. His Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, written for household reading, did for the family and the fireside what his tracts did for the tract-rack: it made the plain sense of Scripture plainly available, verse by verse, to anyone who could read at all.

He had no patience with vagueness in religion, and none with the notion that a man might drift into heaven on the strength of a respectable life. His most famous tract asked the reader a single searching question and would not let it go — Do you pray? — for he was convinced that private prayer, which no one but God can see a man keep, is the truest test there is of a living faith.

Diligence in prayer is the secret of eminent holiness.

— J. C. Ryle

Nor would he let his readers rest in a vague hope of heaven while unprepared for it. He preached holiness as the necessary companion of forgiveness — not the ground of salvation, but its fruit and its evidence — and he put it in words no one could mistake.

We must be saints before we die, if we are to be saints afterwards in glory.

— J. C. Ryle, Holiness

The Bishop of Liverpool

In 1880, at the age of sixty-four — an age when most men are thinking of rest — Ryle was named the first Bishop of the newly created diocese of Liverpool, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. It was a hard field: a great industrial city of more than a million souls, with slums and poverty on a scale that would have daunted a younger man. Ryle threw himself into it for twenty years. He made a characteristic decision at the outset: rather than pour money into a grand cathedral, he would first see his clergy properly paid and pensioned, and the working districts reached. He set up a fund to pension his worn-out clergy, multiplied the ranks of lay Scripture-readers who could go where a surpliced curate never would, and drove the building of scores of new churches and mission halls in the districts the respectable church had forgotten. The plain gospel he had preached in a Suffolk village was carried into the courts and alleys of a dockland city. Through it all he wrote on, pouring out the same clear tracts, unmoved by fashion or criticism; and though a great and controversial figure now, mitred and titled, he remained to the end exactly what the ruined young curate had become — an evangelical of the old school, unfashionable, immovable, and clear.

He resigned early in 1900, in his eighty-fourth year, worn out at last, and died within a few months. On his gravestone they carved the verse that had arrested him more than sixty years before, the whole of his theology and the whole of his story in a single line: By grace are ye saved through faith.

The legacy of a plain man

Ryle wrote as he preached, and he preached as he believed — that the deepest truths are best served in the simplest words, and that a gospel a ploughman cannot understand is of little use to a ploughman. More than a century after his death his tracts are still in print and still doing their old work, asking their old questions of new readers. He never dazzled and never meant to. He aimed only to be understood, and to send men and women to the same grace that had once been read out to him, clause by clause, in a church whose name he could not recall. His whole ministry was an extended commentary on the verse on his grave: that we are saved not by our wealth or our works or our will, but freely, by grace, through faith — and that it is the gift of God.