J.C. Ryle: A 19th-century Evangelical

http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/200604/200604_120_JCRyle.cfm

[Enrichment Journal] 22 July 2009--A friend and his wife were on a long journey. While she drove, he retrieved a book from his briefcase entitled Christian Leaders of the Eighteenth Century. The author’s short, pithy sentences, compelling logic, and penetrating insight into the spiritual power that worked through Wesley, Whitefield, and Romaine affected him deeply. He closed the book in tears, longing to see that same power in today’s church. The book’s author was 19th-century saint, John Charles Ryle.

Time has a way of winnowing the important from the superficial; the permanent from the transitory. Most books published in 2006 will be out of print in 10 years. However, many authors — such as Arthur W. Pink and C.S. Lewis, who were relatively unknown in their generations — have become increasingly influential with the passing of time.

Ryle was a 19th-century Anglican pastor. He was born in 1816. When he died in 1900, he was relatively unknown outside the Anglican Church in Britain. But since Ryle’s death, his books have slowly grown in popularity. Writing a tribute to Ryle in 2002, J.I. Packer noted that Ryle’s books had sold more than 12 million copies and had been translated into at least a dozen languages; the numbers continue to climb.1 Many pastors have probably read Ryle’s most popular works — Holiness, Five English Reformers, or Great Leaders of the Eighteenth Century. “A hundred years later,” wrote his biographer, “we can see that there were few more influential evangelicals in the Victorian era than Bishop Ryle.”2

Ryle was a contemporary of Charles H. Spurgeon, Dwight L. Moody, George Mueller, and Hudson Taylor. When Ryle was 15, Charles Darwin graduated from Cambridge. His was the age of Dickens, the American Civil War, and a British Empire on which the sun never set.

Who was Ryle, and what can pastors learn from his life?