J. C. Ryle on True Heart Religion and Counterfeit Faith

Heart Religion

One of the keynotes of Victorian evangelical piety was “heart religion.” It aimed to be experiential, personal, and emotionally engaged, set in contrast to Christian legalism, nominalism, formalism, and barren orthodoxy. The movement drew deeply from the language of the “heart” that pervades The Book of Common Prayer, and from Puritan devotional literature, as well as from famous Evangelical Revival texts, such as Jonathan Edwards’ A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) and John Newton’s Cardiphonia: or the Utterance of the Heart (1781), which were republished in multiple editions during the nineteenth century.¹ These ideas blossomed in evangelical hymnody, poetry, preaching, devotional aids, evangelistic tracts, and conversion narratives. Ryle stood within this affective tradition and frequently brought a heart-centered emphasis to his writings.

Heart religion was a central motif, for example, in Ryle’s tract Lot’s Wife (1855). He suggested that the religious participation of Lot’s wife was “kept up for fashion’s sake and not from feeling. It was a cloak worn for the sake of pleasing her company, but not from any sense of value.” Outwardly, she conformed to her husband’s faith and “allowed herself to be passively towed along in his wake. But all this time her heart was wrong in the sight of God. The world was in her heart, and her heart was in the world.” Ryle warned that, like Lot’s wife, someone can enjoy many spiritual privileges and yet remain unconverted. “The same fire which melts the wax hardens the clay. . . . Nothing so hardens the heart of man as a barren familiarity with sacred things.” His readers might have been raised by Christian parents and taught the gospel from infancy, or be members of evangelical congregations with excellent preaching, or be employed as servants by Christian families “in a house where the fear of God reigns” and household prayers were conducted daily. Yet these spiritual advantages counted for nothing without a changed heart. “After all, what have you got in your heart?” he asked. “Have you yet received the Holy Ghost? If not, you are no better than Lot’s wife.”²

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. 

This theme was expounded at greater length in Is Thy Heart Right?, Ryle’s annual address for New Year 1860. Like many of his tracts, it was marketed for wide distribution, priced at one shilling and six pence per dozen (that is, one and a half pence each), to be bought in bulk.³ “I do not ask about your head,” he began. “You may know the whole truth as it is in Jesus, and consent that it is good. You may be clear, correct, and sound in your religious opinions.” Nor was he enquiring about his readers’ outward behavior. “It may be moral, decent, respectable, in the eyes of men. Your minister, and friends, and neighbours, may see nothing very wrong in your general conduct. But all this time you may be hanging on the brink of everlasting ruin.”⁴ What God demands, first and foremost, Ryle insisted, is the heart: “We may give God a bowed head and a serious face, our bodily presence in His house, and a loud amen. But until we give God our heart, we give Him nothing at all.”⁵

For analogies, Ryle turned first to modern technology. A pocket watch might be expensive and beautiful—with skillfully designed face and hands—but it would not work if the mainspring was broken. A steam engine might be expertly built—with every joint, crank, and rod in the correct place—but it would not operate if the furnace was cold. Next, Ryle turned to the Old Testament idea of a “stony heart” (Ezek. 11:19), approaching the metaphor from different angles.

First, a stone is hard. He spoke of the granite rocks on the Cornish coast, pummeled by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean for thousands of years but standing unbroken. “It is just the same with the natural heart. Afflictions, mercies, losses, crosses, sermons, counsels, books, tracts, speaking, writing—all, all are unable to soften it. Until the day that God comes down to change it, it remains unmoved.”⁶

Second, a stone is cold. Helmingham parish church where Ryle was rector is a small building dominated by impressive memorial statues to the Tollemache family of Helmingham Hall. Next to the pulpit is a monument to the first baronet, Sir Lionel Tollemache (1562–1612), knighted by James I, and his three Tollemache predecessors, each portrayed in a formal pose, kneeling in a row, wearing beards and ruffs, and swords at their hips. Immediately opposite the pulpit is a statue of the second baronet, another Sir Lionel Tollemache (1591–1640), a member of Parliament during the reign of Charles I, portrayed lying on his side, in his armor, with his head resting on his hand and a fixed gaze. Ryle observed:

The old marble statues in Helmingham church have heard the substance of every tract I have ever written. Yet they never show any feeling. Not a muscle of their marble faces ever shrinks or moves. It is just the same with the natural heart. It is utterly destitute of spiritual feeling. It cares less for the story of Christ’s death on the cross, than it does for the last new novel, or the last debate in Parliament, or the account of a railway accident, or a shipwreck, or an execution. Until God sends fire from heaven to warm it, the natural heart of man has no feeling about religion.

Third, a stone is barren. Turning to agriculture, Ryle reminded his East Anglian audience that farmers could reap a good harvest from Norfolk sands, Cambridgeshire fens, or Suffolk clay but would never manage to grow crops on the summit of Mount Snowdon or Ben Nevis, the highest mountains in Wales and Scotland. “You will never reap wheat on granite or slate—on lime-stone or trap-stone—on oolite or sandstone—on flint or on chalk.” It is the same with the natural heart, Ryle explained, bearing no fruit.⁷

Fourth, a stone is dead, without growth or movement. Ryle pointed to Bass Rock, an uninhabited volcanic island in Scotland’s Firth of Forth, and to Mont Blanc in the Alps, unchanged for thousands of years. In the same way, the natural heart “has not a spark of spiritual life about it. Until God plants the Holy Ghost in it, it is dead and motionless about real religion.”⁸

He urged in conclusion: “You may go to the best church on earth, and hear the best of preachers. You may be the best of churchmen, or the soundest member of a chapel. But all this time if your heart is not right in the sight of God, you are on the high road to destruction.”⁹

Until we give God our heart, we give him nothing at all.

Counterfeit Faith

Ryle explicitly linked conversion of the heart with religious integrity. “There is nothing about it of falsehood, hypocrisy, or part-acting,” he observed in Is Thy Heart Right? “Its religion will be real, genuine, thorough, and sincere.”¹⁰ This particular aspect of heart religion was the focus of Ryle’s tract for New Year 1862, entitled Is It Real? Piling up synonyms, he warned against a Christianity that was “base, and hollow, and formal, and false, and counterfeit, and sham, and nominal.”

Real religion is not mere show, and pretence, and skin-deep feeling, and temporary profession, and outside work. It is something inward, solid, substantial, intrinsic, living, lasting. You know the difference between base coin and good money—between solid gold and tinsel—between plated metal and silver—between real stone and plaster imitation.

Ryle suggested that the 1860s in British culture was “universally an age of base metal and alloy,” full of cheap imitations.¹¹ As he protested in another tract: “We live in an age of shams, cheats, deceptions, and impositions . . . of white-wash, varnish, lacquer, and veneer . . . of plaster, compo, plating, gilding, and electrotyping . . . of adulterated food, paste diamonds, false weights and measures, unsound timber, and shoddy clothing.”¹² This wider Victorian phenomenon had also infiltrated the churches, Ryle believed. “If we measure the religion of the age by its apparent quantity, there is much of it. But if we measure it by its quality, there is very little indeed. On every side we want more reality.”¹³

Reflecting on Jesus’s rebukes to the scribes and Pharisees despite their external moral behavior, Ryle emphasized “the exceeding abominableness of false profession and mere outward religion in God’s sight. Open profligacy and willful obedience to fleshly lusts are no doubt ruinous sins, if not given up. But there seems nothing which is so displeasing to Christ as hypocrisy and unreality.”¹⁴ He asserted that in every age of the Christian church, since the days of Judas Iscariot and Simon Magus in the New Testament, there had been “a vast amount of unreality and mere nominal religion among professing Christians.” There was abundant evidence of this in the mid-nineteenth century, he suggested. Beginning with his own denomination, the Church of England, Ryle lamented that for many parishioners their religion was not “real Christianity” but “Churchianity.” “They are baptized at her fonts, married at her communion rails, buried in her churchyards, preached to on Sundays by her ministers,” but the great doctrines of apostolic Christianity as laid down in The Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles had no influence on their lives. Turning next to Nonconformity, he likewise maintained that for many their religion was mere “Dissentianity.” “Their Christianity is as sapless and fruitless as a dead tree, and as dry and marrow-less as an old bone.” He lamented that Victorian Nonconformists were often “utterly destitute” of the “experimental and practical piety” of their famous Puritan predecessors like John Owen, Thomas Manton, Thomas Goodwin, Richard Baxter, and Robert Traill.¹⁵

The same was true of particular theological traditions in the Church of England. Ryle rebuked Tractarianism—revised to “Ritualism” in the compilation version of his tract¹⁶—for breeding unreality: “You will sometimes see men boiling over with zeal about vestments, and gestures, and postures, and church decorations, and daily services, and frequent communions, while their hearts are manifestly in the world.” Their Christianity was false, “a mere name.” Yet Ryle reserved his fiercest strictures for evangelicalism. He lamented that although evangelicals professed “great affection for the pure ‘Gospel,’ ” they often did that gospel great damage:

They will talk loudly of soundness in the faith, and have a keen nose for heresy. They will run eagerly after popular preachers, and applaud protestant speakers at public meetings to the very echo. They are familiar with all the phrases of evangelical religion, and can converse fluently about its leading doctrines. . . . And yet these people in private will sometimes do things of which even some heathens would be ashamed.

Ryle criticized the dishonesty, injustice, anger, selfishness, pride, and unkindness often revealed in evangelical circles. “And is such Christianity as this real? It is not. It is a miserable imposture, a base cheat and caricature.” When surveying contemporary Christianity, he concluded sorrowfully that “the abounding want of reality . . . is to be seen on every side.”¹⁷

Genuine Christian faith, Ryle argued, is rooted in the heart. It must not be merely intellectual: “You may know the truth, and assent to the truth, and believe the truth, and yet be wrong in God’s sight.” Nor merely verbal: “You may repeat the creed daily. You may say ‘amen’ to public prayer in church, and yet have nothing more than an outward religion.” Nor merely emotional: “You may weep under preaching one day, and be lifted to the third heaven by joyous excitement another day, and yet be dead to God.” The ultimate test is the Christian’s heart.

Your religion, if it is real, and given by the Holy Ghost, must be in your heart. It must occupy the citadel. It must hold the reins. It must sway the affections. It must lead the will. It must direct the tastes. It must influence the choices and decisions. It must fill the deepest, lowest, inmost seat in your soul.¹⁸

Unreal Christianity, Ryle declared, is particularly abhorrent to God. It would therefore be preferable “to be found an ignorant heathen at the last day, than to be found with nothing better than a nominal religion.” “Cease from all trifling and playing with religion,” he urged his readers; “become honest, thorough-going, wholehearted followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.”¹⁹

This article is adapted from Ryle on the Christian Life: Growing in Grace by Andrew Atherstone.

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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