Again, the same reasoning will apply to the time during which the offer of mercy shall be extended.  If it is purely optional with God, whether He will pardon my sin at all, it is also purely optional with Him to fix the limits within which He will exercise the act of pardon.  Should He tell me, that if I would confess and forsake my sins to-day, He would blot them out forever, but that the gracious offer should be withdrawn tomorrow, what conceivable ground of complaint could I discover?  He is under no necessity of extending the pardon at this moment, and neither is He at the next, or any future one.  Mercy is grace, and not debt.  Now it has pleased God, to limit the period during which the work of Redemption shall go on.  There is a point of time, for every sinful man, at which “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sin” (Heb. x. 26).  The period of Redemption is confined to earth and time; and unless the sinner exercises repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, before his spirit returns to God who gave it, there is no redemption for him through eternal ages.  This fact we know by the declaration and testimony of God; in the same manner that we know that God will exercise mercy at all, and upon any conditions whatever.  We have seen that we cannot establish the fact that the Deity will forgive sin, by any a priori reasoning, but know it only because He has spoken a word to this effect, and given the world His promise to be gracious and merciful, In like manner, we do not establish the fact that there will be no second offer of forgiveness, in the future world, by any process of reasoning from the nature of the case, or the necessity of things.  We are willing to concede to the objector, that for aught that we can see the Holy Ghost is as able to take of the things of Christ, and show them to a guilty soul, in the next world, as He is in this.  So far as almighty power is concerned, the Divine Spirit could convince men of sin, and righteousness, and judgment, and incline them to repentance and faith, in eternity as well as in time.  And it is equally true, that the Divine Spirit could have prevented the origin of sin itself, and the fall of Adam, with the untold woes that proceed therefrom.  But it is not a question of power.  It is a question of intention, of determination, and of testimony upon the part of God.  And He has distinctly declared in the written Revelation, that it is His intention to limit the converting and saving influences of His Spirit to time and earth.  He tells the whole world unequivocally, that His spirit shall not always strive with man, and that the day of judgment which occurs at the end of this Dispensation of grace, is not a day of pardon but of doom.  Christ’s description of the scenes that will close up this Redemptive Economy,—­the throne, the opened books, the sheep on the right hand and the goats on the left hand, the words of the Judge:  “Come ye blessed, depart ye cursed,”—­proves