This was the witness of the evangelical prophet as recorded in Isaiah 11:1-5; but there is another kind of preparedness besides which must engage our earnest attention. The same prophet says: "Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way, take up the stumbling block out of the way of my people." (chap. 57:14) We have a duty to our brother as well as to obey the call to turn inward and mind the light of Christ, shining even in the darkness of ignorance and sin. We have to prepare the way of the people who bear the Lord's Name and remove the stumbling blocks out of their way. Our early Friends felt this responsibility. Being changed men themselves they went forth, as sent ones, to change others. If they had merely settled down in their retired meetings and warmed themselves at their own fires, I doubt gravely whether they would have made the acquaintance of the filthy, pestilential holes called prisons of the England of their day. But they had a public testimony to bear and dared to make it known. They were concerned to remove the stumbling blocks of false doctrines, false customs and false worships out of the way so that the many weary seekers after rest and holiness might have their way prepared to come out of the bondage to ecclesiasticism into the liberty and power of the Spirit of God. They wanted the Church driven into the wilderness to come forth again arrayed in her beautiful garments and resplendent with the glory of God, and in some measure they realized their intention. They saw in their own Society gathered out of the multiplicity of sects and systems a beginning of this. And this hopeful beginning perhaps need never to have been checked if Friends had not become too well off in "the piping days of peace" which followed the iron age of persecution. Friends put on their silver-slippers and settled down to become a highly respectable, a most comfortable, and very harmless people.
But the prophet takes a yet wider view. He cries: "Go through, go through the gates, prepare ye the way of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones, lift up a standard for the peoples" (62:10 R.V.). Not the people only, i.e., the house of Israel, but the peoples outside her privileged commonwealth, whether near her borders of farther afield. The prophet would have them lay to heart the condition and needs of the great, busy Gentile world, surging like a mighty sea around the land of Israel. Gentiledom with its rival religious cults, in which often the lowest passions of fallen man are deified! Men making gods in their own image; the nations drunk with military glory; proud of their civilization with its arts and sciences, its literature and commerce, yet so largely built up on Babylonish principles and therefore doomed to go down with a mighty crash; the nations weary and unshepherded, waiting from century to century for guidance! Shall not a people upon whom the heavenly light has arisen, shed that light upon the moral waste and confusion, the rival national ambitions, breaking up the family of nations into opposing camps and producing a condition even in peace times which is only an armed truce? Prepare ye the way of the nations, take the stumbling blocks out of their way!
The present hour is strangely alike to that which confronted the prophet from whose message I have culled the three passages on preparedness. Today the Divine love and power would come in greater measure into prepared hearts. Today there is a claimant call to show the people calling themselves Christians what Christianity really involves. To-day the world at large is anxiously waiting for another kind of direction than that which has plunged it into tragedy unspeakable.