Flowers are often mentioned in the Bible. Man is said to be like a flower, because as he dies and is buried in the earth, so the flower fades and withers, and falls to the ground. I might give you many texts where this comparison is made. But I will mention only one, which you will find in the first chapter of the First Epistle of Peter, in the twenty-fourth verse. “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”
Man is compared in the Bible to a flower for another reason. Flowers live but a little while. This is true even of those that live the longest. Some last but a few hours, as I told you about the flowers of the morning-glory and the cypress-vine. So it is with mankind. Some die very young. These are like the morning-glories. They are beautiful while they live, and parents and friends like to look at them, just as we like to look at the beautiful flowers. But their life is short, very short, like a flower that blooms only for a day, and then withers and falls. When such a child dies, how appropriate to put flowers into the coffin! The dead child is beautiful and pleasant to look upon, like the flower cut from its stalk, and both will decay together.
But perhaps you will say that old persons are not like flowers, for they live a great while. It may seem a long time to you, but if you ask them, they will tell you that life, as they look back upon it, is very short. They are like the flowers that live the longest. While the infant that dies is like the flower that lives but a few hours, those that die old are like the flowers that last many days. That is all the difference. All flowers die, and so do all people, and other flowers and other people take their places.
Why death is said to cut down people.
In comparing people to flowers, the Bible speaks of them as being cut down. And you have perhaps seen in an old primer Time represented as an old man having a scythe, and underneath it reads:
Time cuts down all,
Both great and small.
It is because death is often so sudden both to young and old that they are said to be cut down like the grass or the flower. You see a beautiful flower standing among the grass, fresh and gay, in the bright sun. But the mower’s scythe cuts it down, and it wilts and dies. So it is when death comes, as it sometimes does, to the strong and beautiful. So sudden is the change, that it seems as if they were really cut down like the flower.
The lilies of the field.
Flowers and cloth compared.