Experimental investigation of the spirit manifestations, [electronic ...

ON THE MORALS OP CHRISTIANS. 243tians, an unbeliever in a future state is culpable in the sight of GoJ, aswell as theirs, and disqualified from testifying in courts of justice, can itbe conceived that God would have failed to communicate a knowledge ofimmortal existence to his favourite lawgiver; or how could that lawgiverhave been so devoid of that desire for immortality as to have been satisfiedto remain ignorant ?12C)9. Materialists who have become converts to Spiritualism, all representthemselves as having entertained a great anxiety to believe in immortalityprior to the blessed, cherished truth having been made evident totheir thirsting souls.1270. Converts from Materialism to Spiritualism, who have shown muchzeal in the investigation of the subject, and eagerness in believingin immortalityas soon as evidence was obtained, were, by certain sectarians,doomed to hell for their heresy. Yet this Hebrew materialist, who madeno use of his transcendent opportunities of acquiring correct knowledgeof futurity from the Deity, is made an object of veneration, and the bookwhich he wrote, while devoid of this pre-eminently important information,is worshipped as an idol.1271. His allegations that God authorized the Israelites to horroio inorder to purloin, or that he authorized the murder of the people misled byAaron to worship the golden calf, are manifestly as false as blasphemous.Then why imagine that mankind can suffer by the substitution of a beliefin a future state associated with the purest principles of morality, for thebooks of Moses, which sanction crimes and discredit immortality ?1272. As respects any subsequent alleged inspirations to which Pharisees,the papists of Judea, owed i\iQiv professed belief in a future state, in thefirst place, we have the authority of Christ for viewing them as hypocritesexternally, like whited sepulchres, internally, as no less corrupt than deadmen's bones. Of course there is reason, on this account, to doubt whetherthey acquired a sincere belief in a future state from any part of Scripture.But evidently it did not make them moral. Their immorality, on the contrary,was made more hideous by the cloak of false religion. Nothing ismore detestable than to see religion in men's mouths, with cupidity andunprincipled ambition at their hearts.Yet this much may be said for thePharisees, that they had not professed themselves Christians, and thussubject to those precepts of Jesus which place the acquisition of wealthon a level with felony as respects the accessibility to heaven. The Phariseesof Christendom, even those who assumed to be exclusively the depositoriesof revelation and sole expounders of God's word, have beenahsolutcli/ as wicked as the Pharisees, and relatively more wicked by themonstrous discordancy of their course with their professed devotion to theultra precepts of the alleged Son oftheir God.1273. It has been shown, moreover, that although Christ occasionallyreferred to hell, yet he gave inconsistent views of it, (738, 764.) At one