J.C. Ryle on Skepticism and the Christian Reaction

These words were written by J.C. Ryle in 1879, but they speak as if written today.  It is a long excerpt, but worth the time to read.

"Our lot is cast in an age of abounding unbelief, skepticism and, I fear I must add, infidelity.  Never, perhaps, since the days of Celsus, Porphyry and Julian, was the truth of revealed religion so openly and unblushingly assailed, and never was the assault so speciously and plausibly conducted.  The words which Bishop Butler wrote in 1736 are curiously applicable to our own days, 'It is come to be taken for granted by many people, that Christianity is not even a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.  And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this was an agreed point among all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.'  I often wonder what the good bishop would have now said, if he had lived in 1879.

"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 badly 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 candor and liberality, and with such compliments for 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.

"The existence of this page of unbelief must not surprise us for a moment.  It is only an old enemy in a new dress, an old disease in a new form.  Since the day when Adam and Eve fell, the devil has never ceased to tempt men not to believe God, and has said, directly or indirectly, 'You shall not die even if you do not believe.'  In the latter days especially we have warrant of Scripture for expecting an abundant crop of unbelief.  'When the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?'  'Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse,' 'There shall come in the last days scoffers' (Luke 18:8; 2 tim. 3:13; 2 Peter 3:3).  Here in England skepticism is that natural rebound from semi-popery and superstition which many wise men have long predicted and expected.  It is precisely that swing of the pendulum which far-sighted students of human nature looked for; and it has come.

"But as I tell you not to be surprised at the widespread skepticism of the times, so also I must urge you not to be shaken in mind by it, or moved from your steadfastness.  There is no real cause for alarm.  The ark of God is not in danger, though the oxen seem to shake it.  Christianity has survived the attacks of Hume and Hobbes and Tindal, of Collins and Woolston and Bolingbroke and Chubb, of Voltaire and Payne and Holyoke.  These men made a great noise in their day, and frightened weak people, but they produced no more effect than idle travelers produce by scratching their names on the great pyramid of Egypt.  Depend on it, Christianity in like manner will survive the attacks of the clever writers of these times.  The startling novelty of many modern objections to revelation, no doubt, make them seem more weighty than they really are.  It does not follow, however, that hard knots cannot be untied because our fingers cannot untie them, or formidable difficulties cannot be explained because our eyes cannot see through or explain them.  When you cannot answer a skeptic, be content to wait for more light; but never forsake a great principle.  In religion, as in many scientific questions, said Faraday, 'The highest philosophy is often a judicious suspense of judgment.'  He that believes shall not make haste: he can afford to wait" (J.C. Ryle, Holiness).