Biography
John Charles Ryle was born on May 10, 1816, in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England. His father, John Ryle, was a wealthy banker and a member of Parliament. The family lived in a fine house, and John Charles was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford. He was a gifted athlete and a keen sportsman. He rowed, played cricket and was a fine boxer. He took a first-class degree at Oxford and had his eye on a political career. His father hoped that he would enter Parliament. He was a young man of promise, with every advantage.
While at Oxford, he was struck by an illness that took him away from his studies for a time. During his recovery, he began to read the Bible and was moved by the story of the gospel. In 1837, he heard a reading of the letter to the Ephesians in a church service, and the words of grace seized him. He said that it was a work of the Holy Spirit which changed the course of his life. He became a believer in Christ and a convinced evangelical. He then went on to take his degree and look for a career.
In 1841, his father's bank failed. The family lost its whole fortune, and the estates had to be sold. John Charles was left with nothing. He had been planning a career in the law or politics, but now he had to find work. He was unsure what to do. He felt that this disaster was a call from God. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1841 and took up a poor curacy in Hampshire. He lived on a small salary and was often in need. He had to give up his sports and took up a life of simple duty.
He served in several rural parishes in Hampshire and Suffolk. He was a hard-working pastor who visited his people, preached plainly and wrote tracts. He wrote in a direct and simple style, and he made it a practice to be clear. He said that the aim of a preacher should be to make the people understand. In 1861 he became rector of Stradbroke in Suffolk, where he stayed for nearly twenty years. In these years, he wrote his major works. Among them are Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, a set of commentary for family reading, and Holiness, published in 1877, which is his best-known work. Holiness is a series of essays that call the believer to a life of consecration. He wrote against the idea that holiness comes by a sudden experience, and he insisted that it is a lifelong pursuit that involves effort and the work of the Spirit. His style was lively and his convictions firm.
In 1880, at the age of sixty-four, he was appointed the first Bishop of Liverpool, a new diocese in a great port city. He served for twenty years. He was a conscientious and energetic bishop who worked to build churches and to provide for the poor. He made it a point of his policy to simplify the work of the church. He was a strong evangelical and opposed the growing influence of the ritualists in the Church of England. He did not give way. His directness and his refusal to compromise sometimes made him unpopular.
He was also a man who suffered. His first wife died after a short marriage, and his second wife, Jessie, died in 1860 after a long illness. He married a third time and lost her too. He lost his wealth and his health at times. He bore these sorrows with courage.
He died on June 10, 1900, in Lowestoft, at the age of eighty-four. His books are still widely read. His life shows what can happen when a man of privilege loses everything and finds a new life in the service of Christ.
Sources
“The way to get through this world is to read the Bible, believe the Bible, pray over the Bible, live by the Bible.”
“Oh, let us keep an eye continually upon our private devotions. Here is the pith and marrow of our practical Christianity.”
“A humble and prayerful person will find a thousand things in the Bible, which the proud student will utterly fail to discern.”
“Let us seek friends that will stir us up about our prayers, our Bible reading, our use of time, our souls, and our salvation.”
“Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you.”
“To be prayerless is to be without God, without Christ, without grace, without hope, and without heaven.”
“Prayer is to faith what breath is to life.”
“How a man can believe and not pray is past my comprehension.”
“A habit of prayer is one of the surest marks of a true Christian.”
“I have yet to learn that any one has ever been really holy without a habitual practice of private prayer.”
“Nothing seems to me so clear in Scripture as the absolute necessity of private prayer.”
“Praying and sinning will never live together in the same heart. Prayer will consume sin, or sin will choke prayer.”
“Diligence in prayer is the secret of eminent holiness.”
“Backsliding generally begins with neglect of private prayer.”
“Tell me what a man’s prayers are, and I will tell you what he is.”
“Prayer is the simplest act in all religion.”
“Prayer is the mightiest engine God has placed in our hands.”
“Prayer is the key that unlocks the treasury of promises.”
“Show me a growing Christian, and I am sure he is one that speaks often with his Lord.”
“He tells Jesus everything, and so he always knows how to act.”
“Next to praying, there is nothing so important in practical religion as Bible reading.”
“The heart’s desire and prayer of all true Christians is holiness.”
“No man ever said at the end of his days, ‘I have read my Bible too much, I have thought of God too much, I have prayed too much, I have been too careful about my soul.’”
“I am one of those old-fashioned ministers who believe the whole Bible and everything that it contains.”
Archives
Holiness - J. C. Ryle
Contents
The Demand of Holiness
J. C. Ryle wrote about holiness with the bluntness of a man who did not think the subject belonged only to monasteries, mystics or unusually religious people. He was a bishop in the Church of England, educated at Eton and Oxford and perfectly capable of the polished language of Victorian church life. He chose plain speech instead. “Holiness is the habit of being of one mind with God,” he wrote. The sentence is demanding because it takes holiness out of public reputation and places it inside what a person actually loves, hates and obeys.
Privilege, Education and Loss
Ryle was born in 1816 into a wealthy banking family. His early life gave little sign that he would become an evangelical bishop. He excelled in education and sport, studied at Christ Church, Oxford, and expected a career shaped by family position. Then financial disaster struck. His father's bank collapsed in 1841 and the family's wealth disappeared. Ryle later described the event as one of the most painful providences of his life. It broke the future he had assumed was secure.
His conversion had begun a few years earlier. During illness and spiritual unrest, Scripture became unusually direct to him. Hearing Ephesians read in church, especially the words about salvation by grace through faith, helped bring clarity. Ryle entered ordained ministry in the Church of England in 1841, the same year the family crisis forced him to earn his own living.
The Parish Pulpit
He served rural parishes for decades before becoming a bishop. Those years formed his style. Ryle preached to farmers, labourers, tradesmen and families who did not need theological fog. He wrote tracts and expository works in short, clear sentences. His aim was not simplicity because people were unintelligent. He believed truth should be made plain enough that nobody could hide from it behind the preacher's vocabulary.
Evangelical Anglicanism in Ryle's day was fighting on several fronts. The Oxford Movement was drawing parts of the Church of England toward stronger sacramental and Catholic forms, while biblical criticism and theological liberalism were changing other parts. Ryle stood firmly within the Protestant evangelical wing. He defended the authority of Scripture, justification by faith and the necessity of personal conversion.
The Books and Their Burden
His book Holiness grew from this pastoral burden. Ryle feared two opposite errors: a Christianity that made holiness optional because justification is by faith, and a perfectionism that claimed believers could reach a state beyond real struggle with sin. He rejected both. Grace saves, and the grace that saves begins changing the person. Holiness is never the price of acceptance with God, but a life with no desire for holiness gives reason to question what kind of faith is present.
Ryle's own life included repeated bereavement. He was married three times because his first two wives died young. His second wife, Jessie, endured long illness before her death. He raised children while carrying parish work and grief. The strong prose can make him look emotionally simple. He was not. Much of his firmness was written by a man who had learned that Christian duty continues through loss.
In 1880, at sixty-four, he became the first Bishop of Liverpool. The new diocese was industrial, crowded and full of poverty. Ryle entered the role late in life and worked with remarkable energy. He supported church planting, clergy training, missions and evangelistic work across the city. He was also a Victorian man with some of the class assumptions of his world, and even sympathetic biographers acknowledge that he could appear proud, severe and overly conscious of office.
That mixture is worth preserving. Holiness did not make Ryle personality-free. He could be forceful enough to exhaust other people and certain enough to sound hard. Yet those who worked closely with him also saw deep prayer, generosity and devotion to Christ. A witness becomes more believable when strength and limitation are allowed to stand together.
The Bishop of Liverpool
He wrote constantly. Expository Thoughts on the Gospels became one of his best-known works because it combined explanation with pastoral application. Christian Leaders of the Eighteenth Century helped recover memory of earlier evangelical figures. Practical Religion and Holiness kept pressing ordinary believers toward lived faith. He did not write for specialists even when he had done the study.
Mission was another strong concern. Ryle supported the Church Missionary Society and urged English Christians to think beyond their own parishes. Near the end of his episcopate, even with health weakening, missionary appeals remained part of his public ministry. He believed a church serious about the gospel could not remain closed around itself.
The End of a Long Ministry
Ryle retired as bishop in 1900 after a slight stroke and died later that year at eighty-three. He had entered the episcopate when many men would have been slowing down and spent two decades building a new diocese. His writing continued to travel after the administrative work disappeared.
The word attached to him is still holiness, but Ryle would not have wanted it admired as a theme. He wanted it lived. Holiness meant wanting what God wants, refusing what God calls sin, loving Christ and continuing to obey when feeling offers little help. It is ordinary language for a life that cannot be produced by ordinary strength.
Ryle's witness remains useful because he did not make holiness mysterious. He made it searching. The question is not whether we know the doctrine. It is whether the direction of the life is slowly becoming one with the God we say we belong to.
Sources and references
- J. C. Ryle, Holiness (1877; later editions).
- Iain H. Murray, J. C. Ryle: Prepared to Stand Alone (Banner of Truth, 2016).
- Church of England records and Ryle's published sermons and Expository Thoughts.