How exquisitely Archbishop Leighton comments upon this text! An idea so anciently true as almost to have become, in our ordinary speech, common-place, blossoms into new beauty under his holy thought. So, however, do what seem to ordinary thinkers bare rods in the teaching of the Bible, yet bloom and bear fruit abundantly in the shrine of a congenial heart. “All flesh is as grass.” Yes, he expands it, and “grass hath its root in the earth, and is fed by the moisture of it for awhile; but, besides that, it is under the hazard of such weather as favours it not, or of the scythe that cuts it down, give it all the forbearance that may be, let it be free from both those, yet how quickly will it wither of itself! Set aside those many accidents, the smallest of which is able to destroy our natural life, the diseases of our own bodies and outward violences, and casualties that cut down many in their greenness, in the flower of their youth, the utmost term is not long; in the course of nature it will wither. Our life indeed is a lighted torch, either blown out by some stroke or some wind; or, if spared, yet within awhile it burns away, and will die out of itself.” A new idea is here given us as to the mowing. This poet makes the scythe to be the sweeping of disease or accident or violence that every day prostrate their thousands; accidents or violence represent the mowing; and there is, beside these, the withering too. As though a field of deep grass should be left unmown; yet how soon then would its life and light and laughter depart, and a skeleton array of thin, sere, shivering yellow stalks meet the October winds. Even if unmown, we must wither, and either will at times seem saddest to us, until we remember that this field is but the field of Time, and that the eternal God is ordering all. But Leighton proceeds to develope another exquisite thought, which to many would lie hidden and unperceived in the short and simple word of God--“All flesh is as grass, _and all the glory of man as the flower of grass_.” On the hint of this latter member of the sentence he speaks: