Bishop J.C. Ryle: strangely up-to-date

Posted on June 26, 2008 
Filed under Resources

Bishop J C Ryle“In reviews, magazines, newspapers, lectures, essays and sometimes even in sermons, scores of clever writers are incessantly waging war against the very foundations of Christianity.

Reason, science, geology, anthropology, modern discoveries, free thought, are all boldly asserted to be on their side. No educated person, we are constantly told nowadays, can really believe supernatural religion, or the plenary inspiration of the Bible, or the possibility of miracles.

Such ancient doctrines as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the personality of the Holy Spirit, the atonement, the obligation of the Sabbath, the necessity and efficacy of prayer, the existence of the devil and the reality of future punishment, are quietly put on the shelf as useless old almanacs, or contemptuously thrown overboard as lumber!

And all this is done so cleverly, and with such an appearance of candour and liberality, and with such compliments to the capacity and nobility of human nature, that multitudes of unstable Christians are carried away as by a flood, and become partially unsettled, if they do not make complete shipwreck of faith.”

– Bishop J. C. Ryle (1816–1900) in chapter 19 of his classic book, “Holiness”.