Introduction

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. COLOSSIANS 3:3

Hannah Whitall Smith wrote one of the best-loved devotional books of the last two centuries, and she wrote it for people who were tired. Not tired of God, exactly, but tired of themselves: tired of resolving and failing, of promising and forgetting, of carrying a religion that felt, as an agnostic once told her, like a man carries a headache. The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life appeared in 1875 and has not been out of print since. It has been read by Anglicans and Baptists, Methodists and Brethren, Catholics and Quakers, and it has been quietly pressed into the hands of the discouraged by people who remembered what it once did for them.

She was a Philadelphia Quaker, a wife and mother, a Bible teacher who never trained for the work, and for a few years in the 1870s one of the best-known Christian speakers in the English-speaking world. She was also a woman of unusual candour. She wrote plainly about her own spiritual failures, her long years of darkness, her impatience with pious language, and her griefs. She buried children. She watched her husband’s public ministry collapse and his faith drain away. She did not hide these things, and neither will this book.

The one thread

Her teaching is easy to summarise because she summarised it herself, in a sentence near the start of her most famous book: man’s part is to trust and God’s part is to work. Everything else is that sentence worked out. The Christian cannot make himself holy any more than a lump of clay can make itself into a vessel. What he can do is put himself in the Potter’s hands, and keep himself there, and let the Potter work. Consecration is the handing over. Faith is the believing that God has taken what was handed over. The will is the part of us that does both, whatever the feelings may be doing at the time.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. PHILIPPIANS 2:13

But beneath that thread lies another, and it took her most of her life to see it clearly. Trust is only as sound as the one trusted. A soul cannot rest in a God it secretly suspects of being harsh, distant or selfish. So the later books — The God of All Comfort and her spiritual autobiography, The Unselfishness of God — turn from our side to God’s side. They ask what God is actually like, and they answer with the Shepherd, the Father who has a mother’s heart, the God whose will is good, and at last the God who is simply enough. The early Hannah tells you how to trust. The later Hannah tells you why you can. Read together, they make one argument: the believer rests because God is good.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. PSALM 34:8

That is the question to carry through these pages. Not, how do I feel about God today? but, what is God like, and have I handed myself over to Him?

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on her life, fourteen short chapters set out her teaching. The first group follows The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life: the life hid with Christ in God, God’s side and man’s side, consecration and faith, and the will set above the feelings. The second group takes up the difficulties she was famous for addressing — whether God is in everything, trials as chariots, guidance, temptation, failure and doubt, growth, obedience and oneness with Christ. The last group follows her later books into the character of God: the Shepherd and the God of all comfort, the unselfishness of God, and the God who is enough. A conclusion and a reader’s guide close the book.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. She would have wanted that. She had little patience with religion that stayed in the head, and she measured every truth by whether it made an actual person in an actual kitchen more restful, more loving and more obedient. Read a chapter at a time. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where she must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and there are places where Hannah Whitall Smith must be read with care. It is kinder to say so at the start.

First, the movement she and her husband led was badly wounded in 1875, when Robert Pearsall Smith withdrew from public ministry amid accusations of improper conduct, and in later years he lost his faith altogether. None of this touches her own integrity, but it is a sober warning about a teaching of rapid victory that can run ahead of character, and chapter two tells the story without either sensation or evasion.

Second, in The Unselfishness of God she describes her conviction that God will at last restore every human being — what she called the restitution of all things. Many readers, reading the same Scriptures, will not share that hope, and the historic churches have not taught it. Chapter fifteen sets out what she believed and why, and where it outruns what is written.

Third, her own temperament was steady, cheerful and, by her own account, not naturally emotional. She sometimes wrote as though feelings could simply be set aside, and as though every doubt and discouragement came straight from the devil. That counsel has freed thousands. It has also, pressed too hard, made grieving or depressed believers feel that their pain is a sin. We will honour what she got right and say plainly where she is too brisk.

Fourth, she moved among holiness circles in which impressions, ecstasies and dramatic experiences were prized, and she saw where that could lead. To her great credit, she warned against it herself — sharply and often. On guidance, on emotion and on fanaticism she is one of the most sensible guides that movement produced, and we will lean on her own cautions.

So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture:

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Where she is faithful — on the sufficiency of Christ, on the folly of self-effort, on the goodness of God, on handing our burdens over and leaving them there — receive it gladly and put it into practice. Where she presses beyond what is written, mark it and set it aside. You will lose nothing, and she herself, who hated anything that smelled of a party or a system, would not have asked you to swallow her whole.

A last word. She wrote in the voice of a friend at the kitchen table, not a scholar at a desk, and her books are full of housekeeping and nurseries, servants and children, trains and bedrooms. That plainness was deliberate. She believed the Christian religion was meant to work on a wet Monday morning or it was not worth much. If this companion does anything, it should send you back to her own pages, and through them to the God she kept insisting was far better than we fear.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down, honestly, what you think God is like when things go wrong. Keep the page; you will return to it at the end of this book.

2. Name the burden you have been carrying longest by your own effort — a habit, a fear, a person, a failure.

3. Decide now how you will read: one chapter a day or a week, with a Bible open beside it.

4. Get hold of one of her own books, in the Ochorus library or elsewhere, and read it alongside this one.

5. Ask God to show you, as you read, where you have been trusting yourself for what only He can do.

A PRAYER

Father, I have called You good and lived as though You were not quite to be trusted.

I have carried my own burdens, managed my own soul, and wondered why I am so tired.

Teach me, through these pages and through Your Word, what You are really like, and give me the grace to hand myself over to You.

Keep me from swallowing any teacher whole, and keep me from refusing any truth that comes from You. Amen.