have buried thy husband are at the door, and they shall carry thee out.”
Immediately she was struck dead at his feet, and the young men, coming in, carried her out also, and buried her with her husband. “And there came a great fear upon the whole Church”, because the faithful saw the justice of God in the sudden death of Ananias and Saphira.
COMMENTARY.
The Worship of God consisted in the earliest days of the Church, as it does now, in the preaching of Christian doctrine, in prayer said in common, in the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and in Holy Communion. The love and devotion of the first Christians to the Holy Eucharist was so great that, as a rule, they received Holy Communion at every Mass.
The Internal Unity of the Church. A common proverb says: “Many heads, many minds”; but the first Christians proved the fallacy of the saying. The Christian flock counted many thousand heads, but they were all of one mind, as if they had one heart and one soul. This wonderful unity was the work of the Holy Ghost, whose grace changed the hearts of the faithful, and made them all ready to obey the Apostolic teaching. Thus was granted the prayer of our great High Priest for His Church: “I pray that all may be one, that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me” (John 17, 21).
The External Unity of the Church can equally be traced in the days of the first Christians. They all professed the same faith, had the same worship, and the same government. They all reverenced the apostles as the chosen servants of God and their spiritual fathers and superiors, and all acknowledged Peter as the chief pastor and visible head of the Church. We can see in what light the apostles were regarded, by the fact that the faithful reverently laid at their feet the price of the possessions which they had sold, to be distributed by them as they thought fit. The Church, to be the true Church of Christ, must be internally and externally one, as it was in the days of the apostles.
The Primacy of Peter. St. Peter shines forth unmistakably as the supreme pastor of the Church. He it was who interrogated Ananias and Saphira, and it was to him that the Holy Ghost revealed their deceit. He too exercised the supreme authority of the Church, in punishing the hypocrites with the penalty of death.
The love of God and the love of our neighbour. The first Christians observed in a sublime manner that first and greatest commandment which contains in itself all the other commandments, namely the love of God and of our neighbour. They proved their love for God by their
