+I. Does not hesitate to impeach a distinguished Church dignitary of inconsistency.+--"But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed," etc. (vers. 11-14). Peter had been accustomed to mingle with the Gentile converts on the ground of perfect social equality. Influenced by the fierce bigots of legalism, who insinuated that the circumcised occupied a superior status to the uncircumcised, he withdrew from the social circle of the Gentiles and confined himself to that of his Jewish brethren. The pliability of his impulsive nature led him into this as into other mistakes. To create a social distinction between Jew and Gentile was to undermine the Gospel. Paul saw at a glance the threatened peril, and it needed all his tact and courage to confront it. Though it meant a public impeachment of the sincerity and consistency of one of the most venerated apostles, the champion of the Gentiles did not hesitate. Alone, even Barnabas having for the time being deserted him, he stood up boldly for the truth of the Gospel. +II. Is the opportunity for an authoritative restatement of the truth imperilled+ (vers. 15-18).--In these verses the apostle again sets forth the fundamental doctrine of justification by faith, without the works of the law. The Judaisers contended that to renounce legal righteousness was in effect to promote sin--to make Christ the minister of sin (ver. 17). Paul retorts the charge on those who made it and showed that they promote sin who set up legal righteousness again (ver. 18). The reproach of the Judaisers was in reality the same that is urged against evangelical doctrine still--that it is _immoral,_ placing the virtuous and vicious in the common category of sinners (_Findlay_). "The complaint was this," says Calvin,--"Has Christ therefore come to take away from us the righteousness of the law, to make us polluted who were holy? Nay, Paul says--he repels the blasphemy with detestation. For Christ did not introduce sin but revealed it. He did not rob them of righteousness, but of the false show thereof."