les whose words I
have selected for my text;--faith and doubt, disappointment and hope,
alternating in their minds; their Jewish conceit laid prostrate in the
dust, and yet the expectation of something, they knew not what, now
strangely confirmed. See how these feelings mingle in the passage before
us. "What manner of communications," said the undiscerned Saviour, "are
these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?"-"Art thou
only a stranger in Jerusalem," says one of them, "and hast not known
the things which are come to pass there in these days?" What things?
"Concerning Jesus of Nazareth," replied they, "which was a prophet
mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: and how the chief
priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have
crucified him. But we trusted that it had been he which should have
redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to-day is the third day since
these things were done. Yea, and certain women also of our company made
us astonished, which were early at the sepulchre; and when they found
not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of
angels, which said that he was alive. And certain of them which were
with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had
said: but him they saw not."

My hearers, I think we see, in this instance the minds of these
disciples working as the minds of men might be expected to work under
like conditions. And to me this casts a complexion of genuineness upon
the transactions which, as stated in the record, account for these
mental alternations. The entire passage is alive with reality. The
genuine emotions of humanity play and thrill together, there, in the
shadow of the cross and the glory of the resurrection.

But, if these feelings are thus natural, the experience itself indicated
in that portion of this verse which constitutes the text is not entirely
removed from our ordinary life. The incident which occasioned these sad
words was an extraordinary one; but its moral significance, as it now
comes before us, illustrates many a passage in man's daily course.
The language, as we read it, appears to be the language of
disappointment;---it was under the shadow of disappointment, though
alternating with hope, that these disciples spoke; and it is to the
lessons afforded by disappointment in the course of life that I now
especially invite your attention.

And the precise point in the text,