Acts 10:17

17. What… should mean The threefold repetition convinced him that it had a meaning; it did not tell him what meaning. Did it mean simply what it said, namely, that all animals were now clean, the old distinction being abolished, so that Peter might eat pork, or oysters, or what he pleased? Or was this meaning pregnant with an inner meaning, an idea within an idea; what theologians have called, perhaps not happily, “a double sense?” The event shows that there was this interior lesson within the exterior. It is what we have described in our note on Matthew 1:15, an antitype indicated by and through the type. The distinction between clean and unclean animals was a type of which the distinction between Jews and Gentiles was the antitype. And thus, verbally or visibly, the typical point in the type is so indicated that it describes and predicts the corresponding point in the antitype. The predicted abolishment of the distinction between typical animals contains a prediction of the abolishment of the distinction between antitypical men. (See notes on John 2:19-20.)

Before the gate The entrance at the front, from the street. The messenger did not enter the house, being of a Jew.