Ver. 9. +How turn ye again+ [anew]?--Making a new beginning in religion, lapsing from Christianity just in as far as they embrace legalism. +To the weak and beggarly elements.+--Weak is contrasted with power as to effects, and beggarly with affluence in respect of gifts. The disparaging expression is applied; not to the ritualistic externalism of heathen religions, but rather to that God-given system of ritualistic ordinances which had served the Church in her infancy. That which was appropriate food for a babe or sick man is feeble and poor for a grown man in full health. Ver. 12. +Be as I am, for I am as ye are.+--Paul had become as a Gentile, though he was once a passionate Jew. Their natural leanings towards Judaism they ought to sacrifice as well as he. Ver. 13. +Ye know how through infirmity of flesh I preached.+--The weakness may have been general debility, resulting from great anxieties and toils. It has been supposed that Paul was feeble-eyed, or blear-eyed (Acts xxii. 6), and that this special weakness had been aggravated at the time now in question. Ver. 17. +They zealously affect you, but not well.+--They keenly court you, but not honourably. +They would exclude you+--from everything and every one whose influence would tend to bring the Galatians back to loyalty to the Gospel. Ver. 20. +I desire to be present with you, and to change my voice.+--To speak not with the stern tones of warning, but with tender entreaties. +I stand in doubt of you.+--I am sorely perplexed, nonplussed, bewildered, as if not knowing how to proceed. Ver. 24. +Which things are an allegory.+--Under the things spoken of--the two sons, with their contrast of parentage and position--there lies a spiritual meaning. Ver. 25. +Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.+--Judaism as rejecting the light and liberty of the new dispensation. Ver. 26. +But Jerusalem which is above is free.+--Is the spiritual reality which, veiled under the old dispensation, is comparatively unveiled in the dispensation of grace, and destined to be fully and finally manifested in the reign of glory. Christians are very different in standing to slave-born slaves. Ver. 27. +The desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband.+--The special purpose of the quotation appears to be to show that the idea of a countless Church, including Gentiles as well as Jews, springing out of spiritual nothingness, was apprehended under the Old Testament as destined for realisation under the New. Ver. 30. +Cast out the bondwoman and her son.+--Even house-room to Judaism is not matter of right, but only by sufferance, and that so long and so far as it leaves the Gospel undisturbed in full possession. _MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.--Verses_ 1-7. _The Nonage of the Pre-Christian World._