Casaubon cannot by any means bring himself to approve the manner in which St. Peter treated Ananias and Sapphira, his wife. "By what right," says Casaubon, "did a Jew slave of the Romans order or permit that all those who believed in Jesus should sell their inheritance, and lay down the price paid for it at his feet?" If an Anabaptist at London was to order all the money belonging to his brethren to be brought and laid at his feet, would he not be apprehended as a seditious seducer, as a thief who would certainly be hanged at Tyburn? Was it not abominable to kill Ananias, because, after having sold his property and delivered over the bulk of the produce to Peter, he had retained for himself and his wife a few crowns for any case of necessity, without mentioning it? Scarcely, moreover, has Ananias expired, before his wife arrives. Peter, instead of warning her charitably that he had just destroyed her husband by apoplexy for having kept back a few oboli, and cautioning her therefore to look well to herself, leads her as it were intentionally into the snare. He asks her if her husband has given all his money to the saints; the poor woman replies in the affirmative, and dies instantly. This is certainly rather severe. Corringius asks, why Peter, who thus killed the persons that had given him alms and showed him kindness, did not rather go and destroy all the learned doctors who had brought Jesus Christ to the cross, and who more than once brought a scourging on himself. "Oh, Peter!" says Corringius, "you put to death two Christians who bestowed alms on you, and at the same time suffer those to live who crucified your God!" In the reigns of Henry IV., and Louis XIII., we had an advocate-general of the parliament of Provence, a man of quality, called d'Oraison de Torame, who, in a book respecting the church militant, dedicated to Henry IV., has appropriated a whole chapter to the sentences pronounced by St. Peter in criminal causes. He says, that the sentence pronounced by Peter on Ananias and Sapphira was executed by God Himself, "in the very terms and forms of spiritual jurisdiction." His whole book is in the same strain; but Corringius, as we perceive, is of a different opinion from that of our sagacious and liberal provincial advocate. It is pretty evident that Corringius was not in the country of the Inquisition when he published his bold remarks. Erasmus, in relation to St. Peter, remarked a somewhat curious circumstance, which is, that the chief of the Christian religion began his apostleship with denying Jesus Christ, and that the first pontiff of the Jews commenced his ministry by making a golden calf and worshipping it. However that may be, Peter is described as a poor man instructing the poor. He resembles those founders of orders who lived in indigence, and whose successors have become great lords and even princes.