I know well that many do not believe what I am saying, because they think there is an immense quantity of death-bed repentance. They flatter themselves that multitudes who do not live religious lives will yet die religious deaths.
They take comfort in the thought that vast numbers of persons turn to God in their last illness and are saved at the eleventh hour. I will only remind such persons that all the experience of ministers is utterly against the theory. People generally die just as they have lived. True repentance is never too late, but repentance deferred to the last hours of life is seldom true. A man’s life is the surest evidence of his spiritual state, and if lives are to be witnesses, then few are likely to be saved.
~ J.C. Ryle
Old Paths, “Few Saved”, [Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1999], 84.
