Quotes from JC Ryle

Who taught the child these things? Where did he learn them? The Bible alone can answer these questions! Of all the foolish things that parents say about their children there is none worse than the common saying: 'My son has a good heart at the bottom.

Where there is no heart, there may be lip-work and tongue-work, but there is nothing that God listens to,—there is no prayer.

holy man will follow after temperance and self-denial. He will labour to mortify the desires of his body, to crucify his flesh with his affections and lusts, to curb his passions, to restrain his

No man can die unless Jesus opens the mystic door of death.

We are frequently told by the apostle Paul that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law (Romans 3:28), but not once are we told that we are "sanctified by faith without the deeds of the law." On the contrary, we are expressly told by James that the faith by which we are visibly and demonstratively justified before man is a faith which if it does not have works, is dead in and of itself (James 2:17).

The Bible alone gives a true and faithful account of man. It does not flatter him as novels and romances do; it does not conceal his faults and exaggerate his goodness, it paints him just as he is.

the perpetual presence of Christ with that Holy Catholic Church, which is His body, is the great secret of its continuance and security. It lives on, and cannot die, because Jesus Christ is in the midst of it. It is a ship tossed with storm and tempest; but it cannot sink, because Christ is on board. Its members may be persecuted, oppressed, imprisoned, robbed, beaten, beheaded, or burned; but His true Church is never extinguished.

It describes him as a fallen creature, of his own nature inclined to evil, a creature needing not only a pardon, but a new heart, to make him fit for heaven. It shows him to be a corrupt being under every circumstance, when left to himself, corrupt after the loss of paradise, corrupt after the flood, corrupt when fenced in by divine laws and commandments, corrupt when the Son of God came down and visited him in the flesh, corrupt in the face of warnings, promises. miracles, judgments, mercies.

I know no condition of the soul that is more dangerous than to imagine we are born again and sanctified by the Holy Spirit because we have picked up a few religious feelings.

The Word of God always speaks of two great divisions of mankind, and only two. It speaks of the living and the dead in sin, the believer and the unbeliever, the converted and the unconverted, the travelers in the narrow way and the travelers in the broad, the wise and the foolish, the children of God and the children of the devil.

Take heed, lest you are found at the left hand of Christ at last--a lost Episcopalian or a lost Presbyterian, a lost Baptist or a lost Methodist--lost because, with all your zeal for your own party and your own communion table, you never joined the one true Church.

Surely none are so mad as those who are content to live unprepared to die.