It is, no doubt, beyond the limit of our thoughts, conditioned as we are by time, to conceive of a state of things in which time is no more. Apparently for this reason commentators have proposed to translate, _chronos ouk estai eti_, "the time shall not be yet," or "time shall no more intervene." The former of these translations is excluded by the usage of _ouk eti_ in the analogous affirmations in Rev. xxi. 1, 4, and the other, which is an arbitrary comment rather than a translation, is for the same reason excluded. (I have preferred _ouk estai eti_ to _ouketi estai_, because the words occur in the former order in each of the three instances in Rev. xxi.) There can be no question as to the philological correctness of the translation, "time shall be no more." The unwillingness to admit it appears to have arisen solely from a fixed persuasion, gratuitously and very generally entertained, that time { 96} has a _necessary_ existence, and therefore cannot come to an end. Some have affirmed that when time ends, eternity begins; which is a self-contradictory dogma, because eternity (from _[oe]tas_) is essentially time. The teaching of Scripture on this point is directly opposed to these views; for the apostle Peter tells those for whose sake he wrote his second Epistle, to bear in mind "this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Epist. iii. 8). This is equivalent to saying that time is not an independent entity, but that both its existence and its quality are determined by the _will_ of the Creator of all things. It is in virtue of our being made in His image, and partaking intellectually of the divine nature, that we are capable _in thought_ of giving indefinite and arbitrary extension to time, whether it be past time or time to come. This faculty, as I have already argued in p. 80, is to be placed in the category of the different conditions, whether depending on experience of the course of time, or on affections of our bodily and mental constitutions, under which the spirit of man is formed for immortality. All such conditions are determined by the purpose for which they are imposed, and when that purpose is fulfilled in the perfection of humanity the conditions come to an end. It is thus that the being conditioned by time eventually ceases.