1268. Another cause of alarm has been that it would weaken that belief in a future state of rewards and punishments which is so essential to encourage virtue and repress vice. But it has been pointed out that the authority of Moses is against the existence of a future state, not merely negatively, but positively, so far as any authority is given to him as inspired by God. For what stronger argument need there be that there is no state of existence beyond the grave, than the fact that the being who of all mankind solely had immediate converse with the Deity, should not have learned from him the all-important fact? If, as now held generally among Christians, an unbeliever in a future state is culpable in the sight of God, as well as theirs, and disqualified from testifying in courts of justice, can it be conceived that God would have failed to communicate a knowledge of immortal existence to his favourite lawgiver; or how could that lawgiver have been so devoid of that desire for immortality as to have been satisfied to remain ignorant? 1269. Materialists who have become converts to Spiritualism, all represent themselves as having entertained a great anxiety to believe in immortality prior to the blessed, cherished truth having been made evident to their thirsting souls. 1270. Converts from Materialism to Spiritualism, who have shown much zeal in the investigation of the subject, and eagerness in believing in immortality as soon as evidence was obtained, were, by certain sectarians, doomed to hell for their heresy. Yet this Hebrew materialist, who made no use of his transcendent opportunities of acquiring correct knowledge of futurity from the Deity, is made an object of veneration, and the book which he wrote, while devoid of this pre-eminently important information, is worshipped as an idol. 1271. His allegations that God authorized the Israelites to _borrow_ in order to _purloin_, or that he authorized the murder of the people misled by Aaron to worship the golden calf, are manifestly as false as blasphemous. Then why imagine that mankind can suffer by the substitution of a belief in a future state associated with the purest principles of morality, for the books of Moses, which sanction crimes and discredit immortality?