This article is part of the 10 Things You Should Know series.
1. Ryle is enjoying a huge resurgence in popularity.
John Charles Ryle (1816–1900), the first Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, was one of the most popular Christian authors and preachers of the nineteenth century. His vigorous Reformed evangelicalism and passionate Christ-centered preaching drew large crowds. But after Ryle died, as theological trends changed, he was soon dismissed as a relic of a bygone age. At the dawn of a new century, many opinion-formers turned instead to modern theology and contemporary scientific theory for answers to life’s big questions. Ryle was largely forgotten and rejected. But by the 1950s, it was apparent that, in fact, modern theology was outdated, not classic evangelicalism. Martyn Lloyd-Jones rejoiced in the rediscovery of Ryle as “one of the most encouraging and hopeful signs I have observed for many a long day.” That resurgence has continued into the 2020s, with Ryle read more widely across the world today than at any time since the 1890s.
2. Ryle wanted to be a politician, not a preacher.
As a young man, Ryle was a gifted orator from a wealthy and well-connected Cheshire family in the north of England. His grandfather made a fortune as a silk manufacturer and was involved in local politics as the Mayor of Macclesfield. Ryle’s father was a rich banker and was immersed in national politics as a Member of Parliament. Ryle was sent to Eton College, England’s elite school, where he was elected in 1833 to the Eton Society, an exclusive debating and social club for aspiring politicians. There he cut his teeth as a debater, leading debates on topics such as British naval supremacy, bull fighting, great prime ministers, and duelling. But when the family bank collapsed and the family estate was sold, Ryle’s hopes of entering Parliament were shattered. Instead, he put his speaking gifts to use as a Christian preacher.
Ryle on the Christian Life
Andrew Atherstone
This book explores the life and work of John Charles Ryle, a key Victorian theologian and prolific tract writer. Addressing themes of Scripture, salvation, conversion, grace, and more, this book captures Ryle’s timeless and concise wisdom for modern readers.
3. Ryle was converted to Christ at Oxford University.
In his youth, Ryle always attended church but seldom read his Bible or prayed. He was happy to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (the Reformation doctrinal basis of the Church of England) as a condition of his entry to Oxford University, but this gospel made little impact on his life. He later wrote: “I really was altogether without God in the world, and though many thought me a very proper, moral, respectable young man, I was totally unfit to die.” The precise circumstances of Ryle’s conversion in 1837 are contested, but he often told the story of entering a parish church in Oxford one afternoon, where he heard Ephesians 2 read with deliberate pauses in verse 8: “By grace are ye saved—through faith—and that not of yourselves—it is the gift of God.” It was a decisive moment in Ryle’s spiritual awakening, and that Bible text was later carved on his gravestone. He celebrated Christian conversion as radical, supernatural, and life-transforming.
4. Ryle wrote hundreds of tracts.
Most readers today know Ryle through his books, such as Knots Untied (1874), Old Paths (1877), Practical Religion (1878), and his best-seller, Holiness (1879). But almost all Ryle’s books are compilations—the chapters originally began as individual tracts, later brought together in combined volumes by his enterprising publisher, William Hunt of Ipswich. Tracts were a powerful form of literature. Ryle’s were usually short (sometimes only a few pages), cheaply manufactured, and sold in bulk for mass circulation. Many began as sermons and were designed to grab his readers’ attention. They had pithy titles, often in the form of direct questions: Are You Forgiven?, Are You Happy?, Are You Free?, Do You Love Christ?, Repent or Perish! In Ryle’s own lifetime, 12 million copies of his tracts were in circulation, often in translation, and distributed worldwide.
5. Ryle was an engaging preacher.
As a young preacher without any training, Ryle made many mistakes. In his first pastoral charge, in a tiny rural chapel in Hampshire’s New Forest in the 1840s, he quickly discovered that intellectual university-style preaching was “miles over the heads” of the local farmers and their wives. Therefore, as he put it epigrammatically, “I crucified my style and became plain John Ryle.” This was his lifelong motto. He sacrificed the rules of rhetoric and sermon composition to drive home the gospel message with clarity and simplicity. Ryle called upon the clergy of the Church of England to destroy their sermon manuscripts and instead start preaching “animated, rousing, stirring, interesting, heart-searching, conscience-pricking, mind-arresting, burning sermons.” He believed that lively, biblical, gospel proclamation is the God-ordained means of conversion and spiritual growth.
6. Ryle promoted heart religion.
“We may give God a bowed head and a serious face”, Ryle wrote, “our bodily presence in his house and a loud Amen. But until we give God our heart, we give him nothing at all.” This was a repeated theme in his tracts, such as Is Thy Heart Right? (1860), Is It Real? (1862), and Form or Heart? (1863). Ryle promoted evangelical faith, which is experiential, personal, and emotionally engaged, set against Christian formalism, legalism, and barren orthodoxy. His parish church, in the Suffolk village of Helmingham, is dominated by impressive seventeenth-century memorial statues, all portrayed in formal pose, kneeling or lying down, with a fixed gaze. “They never show any feeling”, Ryle quipped. “Not a muscle of their marble faces ever shrinks or moves.” He argued that the same is true, spiritually, of every human heart until animated by God’s Spirit.
7. Ryle was a master of striking illustrations.
Always eager to present the gospel message in memorable ways, Ryle used simple, striking illustrations. In the pulpit, for example, he pulled out his keys to illustrate one ubiquitous impact of the fall—keys and locks are only needed because of sin! In London, he urged his hearers to listen for the striking of the bell at St. Paul’s Cathedral, amid the noise and bustle of the city, to illustrate the call of conscience. In the British Museum, he pointed to the famous Rosetta Stone (the key to interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics) to illustrate that Christ is the key to understanding the Scriptures. Ryle also took front-page news as a springboard for explaining Christian ideas. During the Crimean War, he spoke on peace with God. During the Franco-Prussian War, he discussed fighting against sin. During the British General Election, he expounded the doctrine of election. Ryle made imaginative use of recent events and popular culture to open conversations about Christian faith.
Ryle celebrated Christian conversion as radical, supernatural, and life-transforming.
8. Ryle loved church history.
Ryle owned a substantial personal library, filled with church history and historical theology. He particularly admired the teaching of the English Reformers and Puritans, as the best expressions of New Testament Christianity, and strove to bring their doctrines back to the modern church. For example, Ryle lectured on the Marian martyrs Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, burned at the stake in Oxford in the 1550s, and wrote biographies of Suffolk Puritans Samuel Ward and William Gurnall. He also loved the evangelical preachers of the eighteenth-century revival, like George Whitefield and William Grimshaw, and celebrated their example in The Christian Leaders of the Last Century (1869), one of Ryle’s most popular books. Ryle’s wonderful library was bequeathed to the diocese of Liverpool, but it was destroyed when the Luftwaffe blitzed the city in May 1941.
9. Ryle buried three wives.
Ryle often addressed the topics of sorrow, bereavement, and the hope of heaven. He wrote as a pastor not from theory but from the grounded reality of his own experience of the joys and afflictions of family life. His first wife, Matilda, suffered from postpartum psychosis, complicated by lung disease, and died aged 24, leaving Ryle suddenly alone as a widower with an infant daughter. His second wife, Jessy, became seriously ill three months after their honeymoon and experienced only brief periods of good health over the next decade, dying of kidney disease aged 38, leaving four children. Ryle’s third wife, Henrietta, caught a chill, aged 64, while waiting in the rain outside Liverpool Town Hall to receive Queen Victoria, and died a few months later. Some of Ryle’s opponents argued, wrongly, that he should be barred from Christian ministry because the apostle Paul says a bishop must be “the husband of one wife” (1 Tim. 3:2).
10. Ryle’s lost autobiography has been rediscovered.
In the 1870s, Ryle dictated his autobiography, covering the first forty-five years of his life. It was designed as a private family text for his children, not for publication. It is a fascinating and unparalleled account, rich in unique details about Ryle’s career and his reflections on Christian ministry. The manuscript was seen by one evangelical historian in the 1940s, shortly after the Second World War, and a poor copy of a copy was published in Pennsylvania in the 1970s, but the original was lost, presumed destroyed. Ten years ago, it was rediscovered, unexpectedly, among the private papers of His Serene Highness John Charles Prince of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, one of Germany’s royal dynasties, a great-great-grandson of Bishop Ryle. A critical edition of the manuscript is now published, one of many new primary sources about Ryle’s life to be unearthed in recent years.
Andrew Atherstone is the author of Ryle on the Christian Life: Growing in Grace.
Andrew Atherstone (DPhil, University of Oxford) is professor of Modern Anglicanism at the University of Oxford and Latimer Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. He has published widely on the history of evangelicalism, Anglicanism, fundamentalism, and charismatic renewal.
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