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I. This question which these disciples asked themselves, illustrates THE DIFFICULTY WE HAVE IN UNDERSTANDING AT THE TIME THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF EVENTS IN OUR LIVES, AND ESPECIALLY OF THE RELIGIOUS EVENTS IN THEM. We are naturally disposed to think that the Important events must be striking; that they must address themselves powerfully to the imagination; that they must stand out, in obvious prominence, from among surrounding occurrences. Whereas it may very well happen that what is most important in reality, that is to say, in its bearing on our prospects in the future life, is in appearance commonplace and trivial. Of course in this world we look at the plan of our lives from below, not from above. We deal with the task of each day, of each hour, as it comes; we have no time or capacity to make a map or theory of the whole and to arrange the several parts in their true proportion and perspective. It is with our conceptions of life as with a landscape painting; some tree in the immediate foreground fills up a third of the canvas, while the towers of a great city, or the outlines of a mountain range, lie far away in the distance. In another state of existence the relative worth of everything will be clear to us: here we constantly make the wildest mistakes, partly from the narrowness of our out. look, and partly from the false ideals which too often control our judgment. We look out for the sensational, which never comes to us quite as we anticipate it; we walk near Jesus Christ, who veils His presence, in the ordinary paths of life; perhaps we never get beyond a certain passing glow of emotion, which dies away and leaves us where we were. Our hearts burn within us. But what this has meant we only find out when it is too late.

II. Another point suggested by the words is THE USE OF RELIGIOUS FEELING. "Did not our heart burn within us?" The disciples ask each other the question in a tone of self-reproach. While our Lord explained to them the true sense of the Hebrew Scriptures with reference to His person and His work, His sufferings and His triumph, their whole inward being, thought, affection, fancy, had kindled into flame. They were on fire, and yet it all had led to nothing. Ought it not to have led to something? Ought it not, at the least, to have convinced them that, within the range of their experience, One only could have spoken as He did? Certainly, my brethren, true religion cannot afford to neglect any elements of man's complex nature; and so it finds room for emotion. That glow of the soul with which it should hail the presence of its Maker and Redeemer is as much His handiwork as the thinking power which apprehends His message or the resolve which enterprises to do His will. Yet religious emotion, like natural fire, is a good servant but a bad master. It is the ruin of real religion when it blazes up into a fanaticism that, in its exaltation of certain states of feeling, proscribes thought, and makes light of duty, and dispenses with means of grace, and passes through some phase of frantic, although disguised, self-assertion, into some further phase of indifference or despair. But, when kept well in hand, emotion is the warmth and lustre of the soul's life.

III. A third consideration which the words suggest, is THE DUTY OF MAKING AN ACTIVE EFFORT TO UNDERSTAND TRUTH AS IT IS PRESENTED TO US. I say, an active effort; because, as a rule, our minds are apt to be passive. We let truth come to say what it can; we do not go out to meet it, to welcome it, to offer it a lodging in the soul, and, if it may be, to take its measure and understand it. If we have serious thoughts now and then, and look into our Bibles in a casual way, and attend some of the Church services, we think we have good reason to be satisfied that we know all that it concerns our soul's health to know; perhaps even that we know enough to discuss religious questions of the day with confidence, We drift through life in this way, some of us; malting our feelings and preferences the rule of truth; assuming that what is popular for the passing hour, or what comes readily to us, must be the will of God. He indeed is near from whom we might learn the truth; walking by our side, ready and longing to be inquired of if we only will; but we dispense ourselves from the necessity. Religious truth, we say to ourselves, is very simple and easy of acquirement; that which is intended for all must be open to all, and cannot be the monopoly of those who make efforts to know it. And yet nothing in the Bible is clearer than that it makes the attainment of truth depend upon an earnest search for truth (Matthew 7:7; Proverbs 8:17; Jeremiah 33:3; Proverbs 2:3-5). In conclusion, let us reflect that our Lord's presence with His disciples during the forty days after His resurrection was in many ways an anticipation of His presence in His Church to the end of time. His religion wears a commonplace appearance; its sacred books seem to belong to the same category as the works of human genius; its Sacraments are, St. said, rites chiefly remarkable for their simplicity; its ministers are ordinary, and often erring and sinful, men. But for all that, the Incarnate Son is here, who was crucified and rose from death, and ascended and reigns in heaven, He is here; and the trial and duty of faith is what it was eighteen centuries ago, namely, to detect, under the veil of the familiar and the commonplace, the presence of the Eternal and the Divine. We, too, walk along the road to Emmaus; and the Divine Teacher appears to us, as St. Mark puts it, "in another form"; and our hearts, perhaps, glow within us, yet without doing anything for our understandings or our wills.

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.

WEB: Behold, two of them were going that very day to a village named Emmaus, which was sixty stadia from Jerusalem.