TWICE-BORN MEN

REMARKABLE CONVERSIONS OF WELL-KNOWN MEN
IN DIFFERENT AGES AND IN VARIED RANKS OF LIFE

Compiled by HY. PICKERING

The Bishop of Liverpool

JOHN CHARLES RYLE, first Bishop of Liverpool. Too seldom has so sound and earnest a preacher of the Gospel as the Bishop of Liverpool stood in a pulpit of the English Church. A personal friend of the late Dr. Ryle thus writes of him:

“I was the first to ask him to preach in Oxford, though he had gained a Craven classical scholarship, and a place in the first class of the famous Oxford Final Classical School, twenty-eight years before that.

“He told me on his first visit the simple means by which God had taught him the truth. He happened to go into one of the Churches near Christ Church one Sunday afternoon. A stranger read prayers, but did not preach; he remembered nothing about the sermon. But the stranger read the second chapter of Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians with great impressiveness and placed a pause between each clause of the eighth verse. He read it thus^– By GRACE ARE YE SAVED-THROUGH FAITH-AND THAT NOT OF YOURSELVES – IT IS THE GIFT OF GOD^. (Eph. 2. 8).

The Holy Spirit used that one verse to enlighten the mind and convert the heart of the manly, energetic, and able undergraduate, who, up to that time, with all the classical learning which, soon afterwards, enabled him to take first-class honours, had not learned the glorious Gospel of the blessed Lord (1 Tim. 1. 11).