“What if this cursed hand
  Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood? 
  Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
  To wash it white as snow?  Whereto serves mercy,
  But to confront the visage of offence?"[1]

Anywhere this side of the other world, and at any moment this side of the grave, a sinner, if penitent (but penitence is not always at his control), may obtain forgiveness for all his sins, through Christ’s blood of atonement.  He must not hope for mercy in the future world, if he neglects it here.  There are no acts of pardon passed in the day of judgment.  The utterance of Christ in that day is not the utterance, “Thy sins are forgiven thee,” but, “Come ye blessed,” or “Depart ye cursed.”  So long, and only so long, as there is life there is hope, and however great may be the conscious criminality of a man while he is under the economy of Redemption, and before he is summoned to render up his last account, let him not despair but hope in Divine grace.

Now, he who has seriously “reasoned together” with God, respecting his own character, is far better prepared to find God in the forgiveness of sins, than he is who has merely brooded over his own unhappiness, without any reference to the qualities and claims of his Judge.  It has been a plain and personal matter throughout, and having now come to a clear and settled conviction that he is a guilty sinner, he turns directly to the great and good Being who stands immediately before him, and prays to be forgiven, and is forgiven.  One reason why the soul so often gropes days and months without finding a sin-pardoning God lies in the fact, that its thoughts and feelings respecting religious subjects, and particularly respecting the state of the heart, have been too vague and indistinct.  They have not had an immediate and close reference to that one single Being who is most directly concerned, and who alone can minister to a mind diseased.  The soul is wretched, and there may be some sense of sin, but there is no one to go to,—­no one to address with an appealing cry.  “Oh that I knew where I might find him,” is its language.  “Oh that I might come even to his seat.  Behold I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him.”  But this groping would cease were there a clear view of God.  There might not be peace and a sense of reconciliation immediately; but there would be a distinct conception of the one thing needful in order to salvation.  This would banish all other subjects and objects.  The eye would be fixed upon the single fact of sin, and the simple fact that none but God can forgive it.  The whole inward experience would thus be narrowed down to a focus.  Simplicity and intensity would be introduced into the mental state, instead of the previous confusion and vagueness.  Soliloquy would end, and prayer, importunate, agonizing prayer, would begin.  That morbid and useless self-brooding