Sermon Tone Analysis

! J. C. Ryle – The Man, The Minister and The Missionary

!! by \\ \\  David Holloway

 

*Introduction*

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"One of the most encouraging and hopeful signs I have observed for many a long day in evangelical circles has been a renewed and increasing interest in the writings of Bishop J.C.Ryle.

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In his day he was famous, outstanding and beloved as a champion and exponent of the evangelical and reformed faith.

For some reason or other, however, his name and his works are not familiar to modern evangelicals.

His books are, I believe, all out of print in this country and very difficult to obtain second-hand."

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So wrote Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones in 1956 for the reprint of Ryle's /Holiness/ by James Clarke & Co – Lloyd-Jones being a great leader among non-Anglican Evangelicals during the 1950's.

Lloyd Jones said that he just happened to "stumble across" Ryle's /Holiness/ in the 1930's in a second-hand bookshop.

"I shall never forget the satisfaction – spiritual and mental – with which I read it."

He, then, summarizes Ryle and his work like this:

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"The characteristics of Bishop Ryle's method and style are obvious.

He is pre-eminently and always scriptural and expository.

He never starts with a theory into which he tries to fit various scriptures.

He always starts with the Word and expounds it.

It is exposition at its very best and highest.

It is always clear and logical and invariably leads to a clear enunciation of doctrine.

It is strong and virile and entirely free from the sentimentality that is often described as 'devotional'.

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The Bishop had drunk deeply from the wells of the great classical Puritan writers of the seventeenth century.

Indeed, it would be but accurate to say that his books are a distillation of true Puritan theology presented in a highly readable and modern form."

Two questions then arise.

Why was Ryle not read (and why is he still not read)?

During his life time his "tracts" – the papers that in the end made up most of his books and were basically printed sermons – were sold literally all around the world and literally in their millions.

Why was it that his near contemporary, Bishop Handley Moule of Durham, suffered a different fate?

So why was Ryle not read (and why is he still not read)?

That is the first question.

The second question is simpler and more easy to answer, why should he be read?

During the course of this paper I will try to lay the groundwork for a straightforward answer to those questions.

I want us now to think about J.C.Ryle under the following headings: */First, /RYLE THE MAN*; */secondly/, RYLE THE MINISTER*; and, */thirdly/, RYLE THE MISSIONARY*.

*/First/, RYLE THE MAN*

So let me tell you something about Ryle the man.

He died or (to use the words of the title of one of his famous tracts) he went "home at last", aged 85, on 10 June 1900, just over 100 years ago.

He was then buried beside his (third) wife (all three had pre-deceased him) at All Saints', Childwall, on the slope of a hill looking south across the Mersey into Cheshire.

Childwall, at the time a rural parish, was where Ryle used to go to be quiet and have time off from the pressures of his busy life as the first Bishop of Liverpool.

Liz Holgate, a member of Jesmond Parish Church, was a member of All Saints', Childwall and tells of an elderly member of the congregation who could reminisce about J.C.Ryle - her sister had worked for the bishop.

The Sunday following his death Richard Hobson, a close friend, a clergymen in his diocese and at whose church Ryle and his wife used to worship when free from other engagements, was preaching at the "provisional" cathedral.

Hobson spoke of Ryle's greatness in these terms:

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"[he] was great through the abounding grace of God.

He was great in stature; great in mental power; great in spirituality; great as a preacher and expositor of God's most holy Word; great in hospitality; great in winning souls to God; great as a writer of Gospel tracts; great as an author of works which will long live, great as a bishop of the Reformed Evangelical Protestant Church of England of which he was a noble defender, great as the first Bishop of Liverpool.

I am bold to say that perhaps few men in the nineteenth century did so much for God, for truth, for righteousness, among the English speaking race and in the world as our late bishop."

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Others agreed that he was one of the greatest of the Victorian evangelicals.

His successor at Liverpool was F.J.Chevasse.

He described him as "that man of granite, with the heart of a child" – the title of a new biography of J.C.Ryle by Eric Russell.

Charles Spurgeon, another of the great Victorian evangelicals described Ryle as "the best man in the Church of England."

100 years later many believe that Hobson's was a fair assessment.

But what makes a "great man"?

J.I.Packer says you need at least achievement and "universality".

In Ryle's case there was the achievement of establishing a brand new diocese (Liverpool had just been split off from Chester when Ryle went there).

There was the achievement of his national evangelical leadership.

Before going to Liverpool Ryle was a country parson in Suffolk ending up at Stradbroke Parish Church, where he went the year Jesmond Parish Church was founded (1861).

While there he was considered /the /leader of the evangelicals in the Church of England.

He led through his preaching and teaching, and travelling considerably.

He also led through his other great achievement - his writing.

He was a brilliant writer.

Unlike many Victorians (and particularly religious writers) he is still readable today.

The style is uniquely his own and from a different day to ours.

But what he says is crystal clear.

Then in addition to his achievement Ryle was great because of this quality of "universality".

Packer says:

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"Great men impress us as men not simply raised up for their own day, but as men who are there, raised up by God as we Christians would say, for the benefit and the blessing of generations other than their own."

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Yes, Ryle /was/ a Victorian.

And the Victorians have often had a bad press - sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly.

There was the class system and the social structure which we find offensive today.

That affected Ryle in a number of ways.

Indeed, the existence of social class was the context for one of the defining moments in Ryle's own life.

Ryle had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

He was educated at Eton and after Eton at Oxford University, where he excelled both academically and in terms of sport.

He was a distinguished classicist.

In fact he was one of top three students in his degree year - today, he would have been said to have received a "congratulatory first".

He also captained Oxford at cricket - in one university match taking 10 wickets.

And he rowed in the university boat race.

Later in life he claimed that his sporting experience gave him leadership gifts:

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"It gave me a power of commanding, managing, organising and directing, seeing through men's capabilities and using every man in the post to which he was best suited, bearing and forbearing, keeping men around me in good temper, which I have found of infinite use on lots of occasions in life, though in very different matters."

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However, Oxford was hugely important for Ryle spiritually, especially in his last months at Oxford.

He had been made to think about eternity during a period of illness.

After he recovered he found himself in a church one Sunday - arriving late!

He was just in time for the second bible reading from Paul's letter to the Ephesians.

And the lesson reader, we are told, read clearly and distinctly with a pause between each phrase.

This may seem artificial to us, but it had a profound effect on Ryle.

The words "for by grace ... are ye saved ... through faith ... and that ... not of yourselves ... it is the gift of God" worked in Ryle's life.

They went from his head to his heart.

He now understood what the gospel of grace and salvation through faith in Christ alone really meant.

Now, for the context of Ryle's conversion, remember that the year Ryle went up to Oxford was 1834.

The University was buzzing with the new Tractarianism – the Anglo Catholic movement that Newman said started with Keble's assize sermon entitled /National Apostasy /preached in 1833.

So Ryle's late arrival at that church and his hearing of the lesson from Ephesians was in the early summer of 1837 – four years later.

As an aside, the Revd J.W.Diggle who served under Ryle in Liverpool before being consecrated Bishop of Carlisle, used to impress upon his ordinands that "Bishop Ryle owed his conversion to the reading of a lesson in church" – i.e., not by a tract or sermon but the simple reading of the Bible.

I am afraid you could also say that Ryle was converted by being late to church – that is what gave impact to the lesson – it was the first thing Ryle heard.

My wife, being someone who is always early at events, said that if Ryle had regularly got to church in time he might have been converted earlier in life!

Ryle was not the best at time keeping.

When later in life he was driven in his carriage to the station to catch the train from the country to London, sometimes people lived in fear and trembling as Ryle was often late and urged the driver to make the horses go faster and faster.

Be all that as it may, Ryle looked back on his conversion in his /Autobiography/ that he wrote in 1873, nearly 40 years later, and that reviewed his life up to 1860, "in order," he tells us, "that my children may possess some accurate account of my history of life, after I am dead."

So, speaking of his conversion, he says:

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"It may interest my children to know what were the points in religion by which my opinions at this period of my life became strongly marked, developed and decided, and what were the principles which came out into strong, clear and distinct relief when this great change came over me … Nothing I can remember to this day appeared to me so clear and distinct as my own sinfulness, Christ's preciousness, the value of the Bible, the absolute necessity of coming out of the world, the need of being born again and the enormous folly of the whole doctrine of baptismal regeneration.

All these things … seemed to flash upon me like a sunbeam in the winter of 1837 and have stuck in my mind from that time down to this.

People may account for such a change as they like; my own belief is that … it was what the Bible calls "conversion" or "regeneration".

Before that time I was dead in sins and on the high road to hell, and from that time I have become alive and had a hope of heaven.

And nothing to my mind can account for it, but the free sovereign grace of God."

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Undoubtedly God had also been working in Ryle's life earlier, not least when he was at Eton.

Giving this paper at St Stephen's, Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne, I ought to mention that while at Eton Ryle was encouraged to try for the Newcastle Scholarship – a divinity prize established by the Duke of Newcastle in 1829.

Candidates had to do a detailed study of the /Thirty-nine Articles/ and sit an examination.