Who Was J. C. Ryle? The Plain-Spoken First Bishop of Liverpool

Biography Christian Life Church History

John Charles Ryle was an English clergyman who lived from 1816 to 1900. He spent more than thirty-five years as a country minister in Suffolk and then twenty years as the first Bishop of Liverpool. He's best known for his books and tracts: short, plain, urgent papers on sin, Christ, faith, holiness and prayer that were read by ordinary people all over the English-speaking world. He belonged to the evangelical wing of the Church of England, and he wrote so that a farm worker and a scholar could both follow him.

Here's the story of his life, what he taught, and which of his books to read first.

A rich young man from Macclesfield

Ryle was born on May 10, 1816, in Macclesfield, Cheshire. His father, also named John Ryle, was a wealthy banker who served for a time as the town's member of Parliament. Young John was the eldest son and expected to follow him into money and public life.

He was sent to Eton and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He was a strong student and a strong athlete, known for his rowing and cricket, and he took a first-class degree in classics. By his own later account, though, he had no real religion in those years.

Converted at Oxford

That changed in the winter of 1837, while he was still at Oxford. Accounts of his life say he had been ill and was thinking seriously about his soul. In church one Sunday he heard Ephesians 2:8 read aloud:

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.
Ephesians 2:8

He came to see that salvation was God's free gift in Christ, received by faith, and not something he could earn. Ryle later called what happened to him simply conversion, the word the Bible uses. He spent the rest of his life urging other people to make sure of the same change. "All, all men, without exception, must be converted," he wrote in Old Paths.

The bank fails

A few years later, in 1841, his father's bank collapsed. The family lost almost everything, and Ryle's plans for a career in Parliament were finished. He felt the loss for the rest of his life. But it pushed him toward the ministry, and he was ordained in the Church of England soon after.

A country minister in Suffolk

His first post was as a curate at Exbury in Hampshire. After a short time in Winchester, he became rector of Helmingham, a small village in Suffolk, in 1844. He stayed there until 1861, when he moved to the nearby parish of Stradbroke, where he served until 1880.

These quiet years were hard ones at home. Ryle married three times. His first two wives both died young, and for long stretches he was caring for small children on his own. Yet these were also the years when he did his most lasting work. He visited his people, preached plainly, and began writing tracts, short papers on one question each, meant to be handed out and read in a single sitting. They were printed in huge numbers and passed from hand to hand.

Many of those tracts were later gathered into books. Living or Dead? and Startling Questions are early collections. Each paper puts one question to the reader's conscience: "Are you forgiven?" "Are you holy?" "Where art thou?" The later and larger collections, Old Paths, Knots Untied and Practical Religion, cover the main truths of the gospel, the disputed questions of his day, and the daily practice of the Christian life.

He also wrote his Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, a practical commentary on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, written for family prayers and for people who visited the sick. He explained his aim in the preface:

In style and composition I frankly avow that I have studied, as far as possible, to be plain and pointed, and to choose what an old divine calls "picked and packed" words.
Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: Matthew, Preface

His best-known book today, Holiness, first came out in 1877. It grew from the same years of preaching and writing.

What he taught

Ryle wasn't trying to be original. He believed the old evangelical faith of the Reformers and the Puritans was simply the faith of the Bible, and he said it again in plain words for his own day.

He put the cross of Christ at the center of everything:

Depend upon it, the cross of Christ, — the death of Christ on the cross to make atonement for sinners, — is the centre truth in the whole Bible.
The Cross, The Cross

He taught that we are justified by faith alone, and that real faith always shows itself in a changed life. He pressed the reader to make sure his religion was genuine and not just a habit or a name:

If we profess to have any religion at all, let us take care that it is real.
Practical Religion, Reality

And he wrote about prayer and Bible reading as the plain marks of a living Christian. He believed most of the difference between strong and weak believers came down to what they did alone with God:

I believe the difference, in nineteen cases out of twenty, arises from different habits about private prayer.
Practical Religion, Prayer

He also loved Christian history. In The Christian Leaders of the Last Century he told the stories of Whitefield, Wesley, Grimshaw, Romaine and the other preachers of the eighteenth-century revival, and in other books he wrote about the Reformers and Puritans. He wanted his readers to see that the gospel he preached was not new.

The first Bishop of Liverpool

In 1880, when Ryle was sixty-three, he was named dean of Salisbury. Before he took up that post, he was asked instead to become the first bishop of the new Diocese of Liverpool. It was a large, poor, crowded port city, and Ryle gave the last twenty years of his working life to it.

He put his energy into people more than buildings. He worked to provide more clergy and more places of worship for the working families of the city, and he kept preaching and writing the whole time. His Principles for Churchmen gathers many of his papers from those years on the Church of England, its worship and its ministry.

He resigned in 1900, at eighty-three. His farewell letter to the diocese is full of humility and of charges to the men he was leaving behind:

Let me, then, charge all the clergy whom I am about to leave behind me never to neglect their preaching.
Principles for Churchmen, Farewell Letter to the Diocese of Liverpool

He died a few months later, on June 10, 1900, at Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast, and was buried near Liverpool.

Why he's still read

More than a century later, Ryle's books are still in print and still handed to new Christians. People keep reading him for a few simple reasons. He's clear. He's short. He never wastes the reader's time. He tells you exactly what the Bible says about your soul and then asks what you are going to do about it. And he does it with the warmth of a pastor who spent decades sitting with dying farm workers and grieving families.

He also writes with a kind of honest urgency that many readers find bracing. He doesn't flatter. He believed eternity was real and close, and he wrote like it.

Where to start

TheWay Library has twenty-three of Ryle's books, all free to read. If you're new to him, start with Practical Religion. Its papers on prayer, Bible reading, zeal and "the world" are some of the best things he ever wrote, and each one can be read in a sitting. Then go to Old Paths for his plain account of the great truths of salvation: sin, justification, the cross, the Holy Spirit, faith and repentance.

If you'd like a commentary for daily reading, open his Expository Thoughts on Matthew, and keep going through the other Gospels. For a single short tract, try The Cross.

Our guide to J. C. Ryle's books sorts all of them, and our collection of J. C. Ryle quotes gathers his best lines with their sources. You'll find every book on the J. C. Ryle author page.