Quotes & Commentary

The Continuing Mystery Surrounding J. C. Ryles Quotes & Contradictory AI Testimony

One of my valued friends from Tennessee has continue to search out information on the J. C. Ryles quote on the issue of race. It seems now that AI is giving us decidedly mixed signals to the point of being in contradiction. Below is my friends report on whether or not those quotes exist in J. C. Ryle.

I’ve continued the search in original scanned archived materials found online from reliable sources (e.g. Library of Congress, etc. ) and the quote is not to be found in Matthew or Luke.

I asked ChatGPT about it. The reply,

“Upon a search of Ryle’s archived volumes on Expository Thoughts, I cannot find this attributed quote,

“Let us beware of giving way to the modern notion that there is no such thing as God’s providential arrangement of the nations, and that the present attempt to amalgamate all nationalities and races, and to denationalise and unchurch people, is wise and politic. God has divided the world into separate nationalities, climates, languages, and churches, and it is the height of mischief to try and break down the divisions.”

Here’s what I was able to verify about that quotation and its attribution to Expository Thoughts on the Gospels by J. C. Ryle:

*1. The quotation you cited does not appear in the standard text of Ryle’s Expository Thoughts on the Gospels

Authoritative digital editions and searchable versions of Ryle’s Expository Thoughts on Matthew (and the other Gospels) do not include the lines you quoted. Ryle’s commentary on Matthew 24 is available in public-domain editions, and there’s no trace of the specific passage about “amalgamating nationalities and races” in those texts.

2. What Ryle did write about nations and races (19th-century context)

A blog post discussing Ryle (with commentary, not a direct source text) quotes a passage from Ryle’s commentary on Matthew 24 that reflects a 19th-century evangelical observation about the diversity of nations, languages, and races being a providential fact. The blog then extends that into the longer passage you’ve seen circulating online. However:

That extended passage appears to be secondary or interpretive wording, not directly from Ryle’s original published volumes.

The post explicitly acknowledges it is making inferences and its own interpretation of Ryle’s position.

3. Why your search of Expository Thoughts likely didn’t find it;

The version of Ryle’s commentary that’s in the public domain and reproduced on sites like StudyLight and Monergism is a faithful transcription of his published work. Since the exact wording you quoted does not appear in those editions, it’s likely misattributed or paraphrased by later writers.

4. Summary

There is no reliable evidence in the original Expository Thoughts that Ryle wrote the quote exactly as you’ve given it.

The related idea (that God has providentially divided humanity into nations, races, languages) may reflect Ryle’s commentary on Matthew 24, but the extended warning about amalgamation and denationalisation appears in secondary online sources rather than in the original text.

If you’d like, I can help you locate the exact wording Ryle did use in his Matthew 24 commentary (with a direct quotation and link to the public-domain text). Just let me know!”

So, today ChatGPT contradicts what I posted from it yesterday. Another AI hallucination. I’ll keep searching but it appears that the quote is not properly attributable to JC Ryle.

Tennessee Doc

___

Now I would still like to see what Ryle said that found someone concluding that Ryle’s words have the implication that someone saw in them concerning amalgamation.

Dalrymple On Propaganda

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

~ Theodore Dalrymple

1.) Dalrymple here goes a long way towards suggesting that not being open about your convictions in order to protect one’s self from consequences, when practiced on a wide scale, guarantees that the propaganda will win the day.

2.) Think about all the absurd things we have been told in the recent past that had no correspondence to reality.

a.) Wearing masks will aid in delivering you from getting Covid
b.) We went from being told that “getting a untested vaccine will prevent covid” to being told, “getting an untested vaccine will diminish the impact of covid.”

c.) Large jets flying into tall buildings make the buildings collapse
d.) The Epstein files are not that important
e.) Jeffrey Epstein killed himself while guards and cameras abounded
f.) Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine are ineffective against covid
d.) Iraq has weapons of mass destruction
e.) The Israeli Government did not know about 10/7 before it happened
g.) The USS Liberty was our fault (Doug Wilson – Amfest)
h.) The covid vaccine is “safe and effective.”
i.) Charlie Kirk was murdered by a sole crazed gunman
j.) Race is a social construct
k.) Men can be born in women’s bodies and women can be born in men’s bodies

After reading the list above now go back and re-read the quote above. All of the above has been dished out to us in order to humiliate us. It is gaslighting propaganda on a massive scale to the end of controlling us via controlling our ability to think rationally. As Dalrymple notes the end of all this is the inability to distinguish good from evil, and truth from lies. A people who are inundated with this kind of methodology (and we are inundated with it) become a people who no longer even have the opportunity to be a people with integrity.

All of this is why Solzhenitsyn admonished us to “live not by lies.”

Scripture Alone & Roman Catholicism

“It is the original lie of Satan that God, speaking in his Word, needs an interpreter to give man infallible guidance (Gen. 2: 17; 3: 4). This ancient error now is supreme in the Roman Catholic Church. Thus the Baltimore Catechism (Q. 1328) asks:

“How can we know the true meaning of the doctrines contained in the Bible?”

Answer: “We can know the true meaning . . . from the Catholic Church which has been authorized by Jesus Christ to explain His doctrines, and which is preserved from error in its teachings by the special assistance of the Holy Ghost.”

Thus, while affirming that God has spoken to men in the Bible, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that God has not made clear what he means, and so above the Word of God must stand the authoritative interpretation of the Church (which, we are to presume, has an expert opinion about what God’s Word means). This also means that Rome would have us trust in the clear word of man rather than the obscure Word of God.

The Reformed faith views the matter precisely in reverse, holding that Scripture alone expresses divine truth with perfect clarity, and so regarding the Scriptures alone as finally authoritative. The interpretation of the Church (as in its creeds) must always, therefore, be regarded as less than a perfectly clear expression of divine truth, and as necessarily subordinate to Scripture. The authority of creeds is determined by Scripture, not determinative of Scripture. They have authority only if, and to the extent that, they truly are faithful to Scripture.”

G.I. Williamson

The Westminster Confession of Faith: for Study Classes

1.) Now add the reality that if the average layperson needs the Roman Catholic Church to tell him what Scripture means because God’s speaking is so opaque in God’s inspired special Revelation (Scripture) how is the average layperson supposed to understand the uninspired interpretation of what God speaks in His Word as given by the Church without someone else explaining to him what the Church means when it interprets God’s perspicuous word. In other words this reasoning falls into an infinite regress. If man is not capable of understanding God’s spoken Word aright and so needs an interpreter then it is only reasonable to believe that man is not capable of understanding the interpreter of God’s Word aright and so needs yet another interpreter to interpret the original interpreter’s interpretation of God’s Word…. ad infinitum.

Are we to believe that the Roman Catholic Church can explain with more clarity than the God of the universe?

2.) The Roman Catholic church has made so many errors in Church history that it is laughable that they want to insist that they have been preserved in their teachings from error by the special assistance of the Holy Ghost. Whether it is the embrace of purgatory (nowhere taught in Scripture) or the embrace of relics (nowhere taught in Scripture) or having Mary as a co-redemptrix or mediatrix (nowhere taught in Scripture) the history of the Roman Catholic church is one error after another.

3.) It is a pretty good gig to be in the position as an Institution to give yourself the ability to be the one in charge of what God does or does not say. Rome, when it makes this move, has indeed ascended to the seat of God. It really doesn’t matter what God says if Rome is the one with the final authority of what God says and means. Honestly, it seems beyond obvious that with this doctrine of the Church having authority over Scripture that the Roman Catholic Institutional Church has made itself to be God. With this false doctrine promulgated by Rome it is the case that in the Church we live and move and have our being.

4.) This doctrine underscores another doctrine by Rome and that is their doctrine that their is no salvation outside the Church of Rome. This is an obvious implication of the above authority over Scripture. If the Church is God’s final interpreter of God’s mind then it is obvious that to be out of fellowship with the Roman Catholic Church is to be out of fellowship with God. This Roman Catholic doctrine of being the “mouth of God” keeps people who really believe this chained as slaves inside the Roman Catholic whore of a “church.” If one really believed this doctrine one would never leave Rome no matter what demonic deviation Rome might insists that God really says.

5.) Of course this issue was the formal principle of the Reformation. While “Justification by grace alone through faith alone, in Christ alone” was the material principle of the Reformation (the fuse that was lit that set the whole thing off) behind the material principle was the formal principle which was a dispute of where the authority lie in order to determine where to find the mind of God. Rome, following their epistemological doctrine that the Church is the ultimate authority, the Reformers insisted that the epistemological authority for men is the written word of God.

Roger Scruton & McAtee On Oikophobia and The Death of The West

“This disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us,’ and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture, and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours,’ being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call oikophobia, by which I mean the repudiation of inheritance and home.”

Roger Scruton

1944-2000

British Conservative

The West is racked from head to toe with oikophobia. Whites may well die as a people because they have lost the ability to love their own and in losing that ability, at the same time, they have lost the ability to desire to protect their own. The only cure for this is a Biblical Kinism but because we are so far down the oikophobia wormhole Kinism is abominated by both the cultural and church gatekeepers in the West.

You want to know why the West has surrendered to mass illegal and legal migration from third world countries? The answer is oikophobia. You want to know the explanation for diving birth rates in the West? The answer is oikophobia. You want to know the reason for the increase in our divorce rates? The answer is oikophobia. You want to know why interracial marriage is increasingly acceptable when as recent as 70 years ago 31 states had laws on their books making illegal miscegenation? The answer is oikophobia. You want to know the reason for Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade? The answer is oikophobia. You want to know the reason for White folks being resolved to not commit the sin of noticing? The answer is oikophobia. You want to know the reason why putatively conservative Christian denominations keep asserting egalitarian like statements? The answer is oikophobia. It all boils down to the fact that the West and the Church in the West has embraced a intense desire to repudiate inheritance and home… they have embraced Oikophobia.

Unless Biblical Kinism is embraced once again the West will die, because the Christian faith has refused to be the Christian faith.

Doug Wilson On R. L. Dabney … No Disclaimers Allowed

Doug Wilson is one of those guys who will say anything that comes into his mind that sounds good at the moment. Here is a recent example. Now, I want to say at the outset that I don’t disagree with Dabney here – especially given the condition of the Black race in the South at the time – but I’m pretty sure that Doug would be insisting upon all kinds of disclaimers her regarding Dabney. The issuing of those disclaimers would prove that Doug often says things that are convenient for the moment.

“I think R. L. Dabney was a godly Christian man — a little irascible at places but nothing I think I need to put a disclaimer on.”

Doug Wilson

“[W]as it nothing, that this (Black) race, morally inferior, should be brought into close relations to a nobler race (White), so that the propensity to imitation should be stimulated by constant and intimate observation, by domestic affection, by the powerful sentiment of allegiance and dependence?”

R. L. Dabney
In A Defence of Virginia & The South – p. 282

LOL… I’m pretty sure Doug would be ruined if he didn’t put a disclaimer on that. Let the disclaimers be forthcoming.