LET ME URGE YOU frequently to re-examine the foundation of your hope. O, it is a solemn thing to die — an awful thing to go into eternity, and discover that we have been deceiving ourselves! Let us depend upon it that nothing but real faith in Christ, proved to be genuine by a holy life, can support us at last. That faith which consists merely in a correct belief of the doctrines of grace, and prompts to no self-denial, — that faith which allows us to spend all our days in serving self, content with merely refraining from outward sins, and attending to the ordinary duties of religion, — is no faith at all. O, let me beg of you to look well into this matter! And let me beg my dear mother, in her old age, and in view of the near approach of death and eternity, to examine again and again whether her faith is of the right kind. Is it that faith which gives her more enjoyment in Jesus, from day to day, than she finds in anything else?

-Adoniram Judson (Missionary to Burma, written in 1829 in a letter to his mother and sister upon the death of his brother.)