J. C. Ryle, “the Prince of Tract Writers”

An Era of Change

John Charles Ryle (1816–1900) was one of the most popular theological writers of the Victorian period, and the most prominent evangelical clergyman in the Church of England. His ministry almost exactly spanned the reign of Queen Victoria—he was converted to Christ in 1837, just a few months after the young Queen’s accession to the British throne, and died at the dawn of the new century in 1900, just a few months before the monarch’s own death.

The Victorian age was an era of remarkable social, political, and technological upheaval. Industrial powerhouses like London, Manchester, and Birmingham drove Britain’s economic boom. Railways crisscrossed the nation, superseding the old canal network, while steamships traversed the Atlantic, and the revolutionary “penny post” enabled affordable communications throughout the United Kingdom. The frontiers of knowledge were pushed back in every area, from archaeology and astronomy to linguistics and medicine, while popular authors like Charles Dickens (1812–1870), George Eliot (1819–1880), and Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) added classics to the English literary canon. Meanwhile, Victoria’s global empire demonstrated an avaricious appetite for land and riches, colonizing swaths of new territory across India, Africa, and Australasia, defended by the British military from the Punjab to the Transvaal.

During this age of exploration and conquest, many of Britain’s historic Christian institutions were progressively secularized. The Houses of Parliament, an exclusively Anglican preserve until the late 1820s, formally admitted atheists for the first time in the 1880s. The two ancient universities at Oxford and Cambridge, also bastions of the Church of England, were secularized by acts of Parliament, removing all religious prerequisites.

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. 

Competitiveness was also evident within the Church of England, which held a privileged position in national life and covered every square mile of the country with its network of over twelve thousand parishes and over twenty thousand clergymen. Tractarianism, born in Oxford in the 1830s, helped to foster the revival of Catholic theology and later morphed into Anglican ritualism, provoking expensive court cases over the legitimate boundaries of Anglican doctrine and liturgy. The “broad church” movement, forerunners of theological liberalism, also experimented with new interpretations, seeking to integrate modern discoveries with ancient orthodoxies, while Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) stimulated new paradigms in Christian anthropology.

Evangelicals within the establishment were likewise a vibrant and diverse array, engaged in a plethora of missional and reformist activities, and contributed to the theological ferment. They had grown in influence from their Georgian roots as a beleaguered minority, associated with personalities like the former slave trader John Newton (1725–1807), literary “blue-stocking” Hannah More (1745–1833), parliamentary campaigner William Wilberforce (1759–1833), and Cambridge preacher Charles Simeon (1759–1836), to achieve a new position of dominance by the mid-Victorian period. A succession of evangelicals were promoted as bishops and cathedral deans, including John Bird Sumner (1780–1862), the first evangelical to be elevated as archbishop of Canterbury in 1848. The philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury (1801–1885), best known for his parliamentary agitations on behalf of the poor, had the ear of Prime Minister Palmerston, which ensured a steady stream of evangelical appointments to high office. Anglican evangelical societies and conferences permeated the country, often drawing large audiences and sizeable donations, while their publications were multitudinous, including monthly journals like The Christian Observer and The Churchman, and newspapers like The Record and The Rock. Evangelical parishes also multiplied. It was said that in 1800 the number of Anglican evangelical churches in London and its environs could be counted on a child’s fingers, but two generations later, “You could hardly count them now of the fingers of the hundred-handed Briareus,” a mythological giant.¹

Enter Ryle

Ryle was a figurehead within this burgeoning Anglican evangelical movement. He was a natural orator and platform speaker who had honed his skills as a teenager in the debating society at Eton College, and had ambitions to follow his father as a member of Parliament. But Ryle’s Christian conversion in 1837, in his final months as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, combined with the collapse of the family bank in Macclesfield in 1841, drove him instead into Christian ministry. After a curacy in the New Forest in Hampshire, he spent the bulk of his ministry in two villages in rural Suffolk, as rector of Helmingham (1844–1861) and vicar of Stradbroke (1861–1880), in the diocese of Norwich. On the nomination of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Ryle was then transferred to a very different scene of ministry in 1880, as the first bishop of Liverpool, a new urban diocese with 1.1 million inhabitants, where he labored for the last two decades of his life.

It was in Suffolk that Ryle established his fame as a conference speaker and prolific tract writer. He recalled in his autobiography—dictated in 1873 and rediscovered in 2015—that in Helmingham, with only three hundred parishioners, the ministerial load was light, and he had “plenty of spare time” for reading and writing.² From the mid-1840s, he began to publish short tracts, initially as exhortations to his own congregation, which soon won an eager readership across the country. As an author, Ryle was at the height of his powers between the 1850s and the 1870s, his most fruitful and creative period. Although he published some longer books, such as Expository Thoughts on the Gospels in seven volumes between 1856 and 1873, the tract was his vehicle of choice. After his consecration as a bishop, his energies were absorbed by diocesan administration, which allowed much less facility to write, though he still continued to publish occasional sermons and addresses. Ryle was also an inveterate correspondent to the evangelical newspapers, under pseudonyms such as “A Suffolk Incumbent,” “A Northern Churchman,” and “An Old Soldier,” a significant dimension of his literary legacy that has been overlooked until recently.³ Many of Ryle’s tracts began as sermons, and he knew how to grab his readers’ attention. His appeals were direct and vigorous, with pithy titles designed to startle and awaken: Are You Forgiven?, Are You Happy?, Are You Holy?, Do You Believe?, Are You Free?, Do You Love Christ?, Repent or Perish! He often made use of national events and crises, or of moments for sober reflection, like Christmas and the New Year, to claim a hearing.⁴ For example, in his tract for New Year 1851, Ryle urged:

Oh! reader, if you never came to Christ for life before, come to Him this very year. Come to Him with the penitent’s prayer for mercy and grace. Come to Him without delay. Come to Him while the name of 1851 is still strange to you. Come to Him before the winter is past, and let the spring find you a new creature.⁵

Likewise, his tract for New Year 1854 exhorted:

Reader, I charge you not to lie down on your bed tonight without trying to answer my question. I summon you before you sleep to bring the matter to an issue. We stand at the end of an old year. We live in an old worn-out, sin-laden world. Who can tell what a year may bring forth? Who shall live to see 1855?⁶

Ryle’s tracts were also intensely practical. “I hold it to be of cardinal importance,” he declared, “not to be content with generalities in delivering God’s message to souls.” He did not want anyone to finish one of his tracts unable to answer the question “What practical lesson have I learned?”⁷ With evangelistic urgency, Ryle therefore always demanded a response. In his tract on prayer, for example, he called his readers to take action: “Wait for nothing. Wait for nobody. Waiting comes from the devil. Just as you are, go to Christ.”⁸ The tract, second only to the sermon, was widely utilized by Victorian Christians of all stripes to campaign and communicate. For Ryle it was principally a spiritual tool, which he harnessed energetically. “May it be recorded in heaven,” he wrote in 1857, “that by reading this tract some souls were saved!”⁹ He prayed that the Holy Spirit would turn his New Year tract for 1860 into “an arrow to pierce many hearts!”¹⁰ It was a popular and powerful but inherently transient form of literature. Some of Ryle’s original tracts are now extremely rare, even from print runs of tens of thousands, and others have disappeared altogether. They were usually short (sometimes only a few pages), cheaply manufactured, and sold in bulk for mass circulation. Most were given away for free by evangelical ministers, or local tract distributors, as a missional strategy. The response was therefore inevitably mixed. Some were immediately thrown away, burned, or otherwise destroyed by hostile recipients, perhaps in large numbers. Others lay unwanted and unread. In one of his 1858 tracts, Ryle pleaded:

My heart’s desire and prayer to God is this, that this tract may be greatly useful to your soul. I entreat you to give it a fair reading. Do not put it in the fire. Do not tear it in pieces. Read it! Read it! Read it to the end! Who can tell but the Holy Ghost may employ this tract for the saving of your soul?¹¹

Although Ryle’s tracts made him globally famous and won him an eager Christian readership, many of them were originally designed for a more hostile environment, to awaken the unconverted. Ryle became known as “the prince of tract writers.”¹² According to contemporary estimates, twelve million copies of his tracts were in circulation during his lifetime.¹³

During the 1850s Ryle published seven compilations, entitled Home Truths, with about nine or ten tracts per volume. Later he marketed larger compilations, with about nineteen or twenty tracts per volume, which helped to establish his reputation as a serious theological author. The best known were Knots Untied (1874), Old Paths (1877), Practical Religion (1878), Holiness (1879), Principles for Churchmen (1884), The Upper Room (1888), and Light from Old Times (1890). There was also a volume of his preaching, The Christian Race and Other Sermons (1900), taken from his manuscripts. After his death, Ryle’s episcopal speeches were gathered together by another enterprising publisher and marketed as Charges and Addresses (1903).

Although Ryle was largely forgotten in the first half of the twentieth century, dismissed as a backward-looking Victorian from a bygone age, there was an unexpected resurgence of interest in his theology after the Second World War. When Holiness was republished in 1956, Martyn Lloyd-Jones celebrated the rediscovery of Ryle as “one of the most encouraging and hopeful signs I have observed for many a long day.”¹⁴ Many of Ryle’s compilation volumes are now back in print for a global Christian audience hungry for classic evangelical teaching. He is more widely read today than at any period since his own lifetime.

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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