A Reader’s Guide to Hannah Whitall Smith

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 2 TIMOTHY 2:15

Hannah Whitall Smith is one of the easiest devotional writers to read. She wrote for ordinary people, in plain sentences, with illustrations drawn from kitchens, nurseries, railway carriages and sickrooms. Her main books are in the public domain and widely available. The difficulty is not access but balance: her most famous book is her earliest, and it reads best alongside the later ones, which fill out and sometimes correct it.

Begin here

The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875), in the Ochorus library. Her classic, and the source of most of chapters three to thirteen of this volume. Read the opening chapter on God’s side and man’s side first; it is the key to the rest. The chapters on the will, on doubts, on failures and on guidance are the most practically useful. Remember that it is an early book, written in the first flush of discovery.

The God of All Comfort (1906), in the Ochorus library. Her ripest work, written in old age, and the best counterweight to the Secret. Where the earlier book concentrates on our trusting, this one concentrates on the God who is trusted. The chapters on the Shepherd, on the Father, on the goodness of God and on God being enough are the heart of it.

Her own story

The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It (1903), in the Ochorus library. A spiritual autobiography told in four epochs: the long years of searching, the discovery of the gospel in 1858, the hope of universal restoration, and the life of faith that began at Millville. It is candid, funny and moving, and it shows where her teaching came from. The early chapters on her Quaker childhood are a delight in themselves.

Other books

Every-Day Religion. A later collection of plain Bible teaching for daily life, in the same vein as the Secret. The Open Secret. Short expositions arranged by subject. Frank: The Record of a Happy Life. Her memoir of her son, who died at eighteen; a mother’s tribute, and a window into her grief and faith in the 1870s.

Approach with care

The chapters of The Unselfishness of God on what she called the restitution of all things set out her universalist hope. Read them to understand her, not as a guide to Scripture; chapter fifteen of this volume explains why. Her collected notes on religious fanaticism, published after her death in 1928 and edited by her granddaughter Ray Strachey, record the excesses she witnessed in holiness circles. They show how seriously she took the dangers she warned against, but they are written with a sharpness that some readers will find unsettling.

About her

Ray Strachey’s A Quaker Grandmother (1914) is a brief, affectionate portrait by a granddaughter who knew her well. Logan Pearsall Smith, her son, edited a selection of her letters, A Religious Rebel (1949), which shows her humour and her independence of mind. Barbara Strachey’s Remarkable Relations (1980) tells the story of the whole Pearsall Smith family, including the painful parts, with a historian’s frankness. Marie Henry’s The Secret Life of Hannah Whitall Smith (1984) is a sympathetic Christian biography that draws on her diaries and letters. Read more than one. The family books are frank about the strains her religion brought into the household; the devotional lives admire her and sometimes smooth the edges.

Three counsels for reading her

Read the early and the late together. The Secret without The God of All Comfort can become a technique; the later book without the earlier can become sentiment. Together they make one argument: trust, because God is good.

Read with the Bible open. She claimed no authority of her own and argued constantly from texts. Check them, and read them in context; she sometimes presses a single verse further than it will go.

And read her slowly, a chapter at a time, with a particular burden in mind. She wrote to be used, not admired. One chapter acted on will do more than the whole shelf enjoyed.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. PROVERBS 3:5–6