The character of Sapphira seems marked with even a deeper stain of guilt than that of her husband. She had more time for reflection, and received a salutary premonition by the question of Peter. Not to advert to the period in which she might probably be left alone during the various transactions of the sale of the estate, three hours elapsed between the infliction of judgment upon Ananias, and her coming to the apostolic assembly. If her concurrence in this base action had resulted in any degree from mistake, from momentary illusion, or from mere persuasion, she had time to correct her error by immediate repentance: or if she had hitherto sinned with deliberation, it was a time in which conscience might hive been heard, and the wretched backslider have yet been reclaimed. This was the golden moment, the period of long-suffering and mercy, the "accepted time!" Repentance was not yet too late--return to reason and duty was not even now impossible--she might still have retracted her steps, though her worthless husband had suffered for his iniquity, and had passed the boundaries of time, the sacred enclosure, the hallowed ground where celestial mercy dispenses her pardons. Every thing was favourable to penitence. She was alone, and solitude has sometimes shaken the purpose of the sinner, and opened his eyes to an awful perception of the atrociousness of guilt. But Sapphira was "hardened through the deceitfulness of sin." Long since she had dismissed every compunctious feeling, and was hurried on to perdition by the fiends of avarice and vanity, to whom she had resigned the dominion of her soul. The inquiry of Peter, pointed and abrupt--"Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much?" Would have startled an ordinary transgressor, and produced those sensations of shame and confusion which a consciousness of detection is calculated to excite--O, if she had even then trembled, confessed her iniquity, and sought forgiveness through the blood which cleanseth from all sin, who will affirm that she could not have obtained mercy, and perhaps escaped both temporal and eternal punishment! But she was obdurate. The falsehood which Ananias had _acted_, she deliberately _affirmed_, and justice instantly dismissed her to the society of her kindred transgressor in a state of condemnation. Here, then, we read in characters too legible to be mistaken, that "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."