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The text speaks of an experience which comes to all of us in our turn, as life gradually builds us round. At first, in our childhood, it is otherwise. This earth seems, then, to have no fixed hardness; the spot on which we stand melts off indefinitely into a dreamlike distance, which is hazy and vague, and peopled with we know not what possibilities, holding within its rays strange fairy worlds which rumours may fill as they will, and everything seems possible, and anything might happen, and no relentless law of undeviating existence has imprisoned our expectations and experience, and the world of our hopes mingles with the world of our senses, and earth and heaven are not afraid of each other; their lines cross without a shock. But, as we grow up, we know how solid and how hard the whole thing becomes. The earth takes its stiff limits and its exact rules; it is seen, and known, and measured — a round ball, rolling in space, compact, and massive, and blind, and entire — a round, rolling ball, and we roll round with it. We are things in it, embedded in it; we belong to it; we have a fixed spot and lot on its surface. To it we are tied; we are bound to definite purposes which we never dream of disputing. So we travel with the moving earth; and our days are settled for us; occupations and holidays repeat themselves, year after year, with stolid regularity, against which gradually we give up protesting; we make up our minds to live out our own parts; and all the emotions that beat against this even tenour of uneventful days — dreams, impulses, alarms, hopes, aspirations — cease to be more than empty visions. The common day closes in upon us, settled and familiar; the common world is about us, with interests that ever increase, with work and play, with rule and habit; and the steady block of endless business fills in all our allotted space of action, fills it in down to every cranny, thick and solid and unyielding.

(Canon Scott-Holland.)

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KJV: Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

WEB: Then two men will be in the field: one will be taken and one will be left;