A man of good scholarship, sterling character, wide sympathies, and tremendous zeal, J. C. Ryle accounted it no light thing to be entrusted with the work of organizing and advancing the cause of God and truth in a diocese noted for its extensive industrial development and in a city of world fame. As a man of God he gave unfeigned allegiance to the plenary inspiration of Holy Scripture.

Linked with this was his determination to strive for the maintenance of the Protestant character of the Church of England as by law established in the days of the sixteenth-century Reformation. Doctrine, experience, and practice based upon and shaped by the pure word of God were to him the essentials of the ongoing life of the Church.