“Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord,”
By Uriah Smith
During the good meetings that have been in progress in Battle Creek, the past week, the prophetic declaration that stands at the head of these lines has been much in mind. In a subordinate sense, this injunction seems to be binding upon the people of God at the present time. The period in our history we believe has fully come to prepare the way for the Lord to work in the advancement of the third angel’s message, as never before. The way has not heretofore been prepared on the part of some as it should have been. Among a people who profess to be keeping the faith of Jesus, that unity mentioned by the apostle in 1 Cor. 1:10; Phil. 2:2, and other places, which is certainly a part of that faith, should by all means exist. And without this, how could God’s Spirit have free course, and the work move forward in its full tide of strength? But there has been on this point a deplorable lack. Not that there has been open dissension and division in our ranks to any great extent. Probably no denomination in the land has been more free from this. All the public deliberations and actions of this people have been to a marked degree harmonious and unanimous. But that true blending of spirit and union of heart, contemplated in the texts above referred to, is what has been wanting. And this, though hidden from all eyes, must impede that free working of God’s Spirit which is essential to the full success of this work, as effectually as Achan’s golden wedge, though taken to the privacy of his own tent, and then buried deep in the earth, withered the strength of the armies of Israel. In the teachings of the Lord with which we, as a people, are favored, this point is not passed by unnoticed; and we are given plainly to understand that not one-twentieth is being done in this cause, of what might and would be accomplished if all who have a part to act were prepared to take hold together with that true spirit of co-operation which the Lord designs that his people should maintain. This may not be the time or place to enter into particulars as to the causes, manner, or extent, of the failures that have in this respect been made. Suffice it to say that these are in a measure, at least, seen and felt. And there is seen also the necessity of immediately taking hold to remedy the evil, and there is no lack of determination to do it. And the progress that has been made in this direction is one of the encouraging features of our recent meetings. The work is being done, not as a transient ebullition of feeling which is soon to subside, not as a mere matter of a little pleasant talk, which is to vanish with the sound, but on the basis of new principles, or principles newly seen, which will enable all to act understandingly, and which, therefore, gives cheering promise that it will be real and permanent. We believe the time has come for a great work to be done in the cause of truth; the time for the nineteenth-twentieths of lack to be made up, and for the work to go with twenty-fold more power than at any time in the past. Whittier, in one of his poems, uses the following language:— “If we have whispered truth,
Whisper no longer;
Speak as the tempest does,
Sterner and stronger.”
Can we not make this language applicable to our own case? As the result of the Conference, we are beginning to conceive it to be a possible thing that all that has thus far been done in this work, compared with what is speedily to be, is but as a whisper compared with the roar of the tempest. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Take up the stumbling-blocks from the King’s highway. Close up the ranks. Throw away self-righteousness. Let our hearts break before the Lord, and become plastic under the molding hands of the Lord of the message, and let him fashion us into his own image. And when we all come into the right position, be assured he will not delay a work, which he has long waited, and is still waiting, to accomplish for his truth and his people. U. S.