A Quaker in Search of God

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him. PSALM 62:5

A Quaker childhood. Hannah Tatum Whitall was born in Philadelphia on the seventh of February, 1832, into a prosperous and devout family of the Society of Friends. Her father, John Mickle Whitall, had gone to sea as a young man and sailed to China before settling into the glass business; her mother, Mary Tatum Whitall, came of the same plain, earnest stock. The home was Quaker through and through — the plain dress, the plain speech, the silent meetings, the thee and thy — and it was a happy one. In The Unselfishness of God, written when she was past seventy, she called her parents the most delightful any child ever had, and said that her first notions of her heavenly Father were learned from her earthly one. That childhood left her with two lasting gifts: a conviction that goodness is meant to be practical, and a readiness to believe that love at its best is a picture of God.

The long search. At sixteen something woke in her. It was not, she said, a sense of sin but a glimpse of the sheer magnificence of God, caught while a teacher read to her class about the stars. From that day her search began, and for ten years it went nowhere. She had been taught to look for God in the light within, and she turned her gaze inward on her own feelings, trying to work them up to the pitch she supposed God required. Her diary from those years is, by her own frank description, a long record of wrestling with hardly a ray of light. She could not repent to order, could not feel what she thought she ought to feel, and concluded that God must be a distant and exacting Being who would take notice of her only if she made herself worthy. She married Robert Pearsall Smith, of another Quaker family, in 1851, when she was nineteen. The widening of her life drew her out of her self-absorption, but not into faith. By her early twenties she had reasoned herself into scepticism, unable to reconcile a good and powerful God with the misery of the world.

The first discovery. In 1858 two things happened together. A little daughter of five died, and Hannah could not bear to think of her gone out alone into a godless universe. And that same year, the great noonday prayer meetings of the revival were crowding the business streets of American cities. She went into one out of curiosity. She heard nothing she could remember afterwards, but she came out convinced that God was a fact — the bottom fact of all facts — and that the one thing to do was to find out about Him. She took a Bible to the seashore that summer and nothing else, read Romans with a small explanatory book a visitor gave her, and discovered that salvation was the work of Another, received simply by believing what God had said. A Plymouth Brother had to tell her that this discovery meant she was a Christian. She had supposed she had merely found out some wonderful news. From then on she told it to everyone, in corners and behind doors, to the alarm of the quieter Friends.

The Brethren and the questions. For some years her teachers were the Plymouth Brethren. They gave her clarity, a love of the Bible and an orderly doctrine of justification, and she became a confident teacher of it. But their strict Calvinism troubled her deeply. She could not rest in a salvation that seemed to her narrow and selfish while so many had never had a fair chance, and she came in time to the hope that God would at last restore every soul He had made. That hope, which she held for the rest of her life, will be weighed in its place.

Millville and the second discovery. In 1865 family business took the Smiths from Germantown to Millville, New Jersey, where the Whitall glassworks stood. Hannah hated the move and knew she ought not to. She had been forgiven, she said, but she was not delivered: her inner life was full of irritation, coldness, anxiety and rebellion, and every older Christian she consulted told her that constant sinning and repenting was all anyone could expect. It was a dressmaker who first told her otherwise, and a little Methodist meeting of factory workers that showed her. There she heard a woman with a shawl over her head say that her whole horizon had once been filled with the great big Me of hers, and that it had shrivelled to nothing when she saw Christ as her perfect Saviour. Hannah went to teach and stayed to learn. What she learned she summed up in four words — not I, but Christ — and it became the fourth and, as she called it, the most captivating epoch of her life. Robert came into the same experience soon afterwards, in a more emotional way, at a holiness camp meeting.

The angel of the churches. The Smiths began to speak and write. Robert edited a paper, and Hannah’s Bible readings, plain and practical and unexpectedly witty, drew people who distrusted revivalists. In 1873 Robert went to England; Hannah followed. In a London drawing room she was questioned by evangelical ladies who had heard of her unorthodox hope, and she answered honestly. One of them, Mrs Cowper-Temple, later Lady Mount Temple, kissed her and invited her to Broadlands, the family’s house in Hampshire. The meetings there opened the way to larger conferences at Oxford in 1874 and Brighton in 1875, where thousands gathered from across Britain and the Continent. People called her the angel of the churches. Out of those meetings grew the convention at Keswick, first held that same summer of 1875, which has gathered Christians for the deepening of spiritual life ever since. That year, too, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life was published as a book.

The fall. Within weeks of Brighton the work was in pieces. Robert had been reported by others for improper conduct toward a young woman, bound up with loose talk about spiritual experience, and the leaders of the movement quietly required him to withdraw from public work. He returned to America broken in health and never recovered his place. Over the following years he drifted from the faith altogether. Hannah stood by him and kept her own convictions, but the marriage never recovered its early happiness. It is right to say no more than is known, and right not to say less.

Graves and griefs. The 1870s were full of other sorrows. Her eldest son, Frank, died in 1872 at eighteen, and she wrote a short memoir of him. Later their daughter Rachel, still a child, died too. Of the seven children Hannah bore, four died before her. The three who lived — Mary, Logan and Alys — grew into gifted adults who moved far from their mother’s faith. She loved them without condition and did not pretend to be untouched.

Reform and England. Hannah was never only a devotional writer. She was active in the temperance cause and among the early leaders of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, spoke for the rights of women, and liked nothing better than an argument. In 1888 the Smiths moved to England to be near their married daughter, and there she spent the rest of her life, writing, entertaining a large circle of family and friends, and corresponding with anyone who asked for help. Robert died in 1898. In 1903 she published The Unselfishness of God, the story of her soul told in four epochs, and in 1906 The God of All Comfort, the ripest statement of her teaching. She had also been collecting, over many years, accounts of religious fanaticism she had witnessed, as a warning to others.

The end. In old age arthritis confined her to a wheelchair. She wrote that knowing God is and that God is enough made old age a resting place and death something to look forward to, and those who knew her said her cheerfulness never failed. She died on the first of May, 1911, aged seventy-nine. She had lost much — children, a husband’s faith, a public reputation, the hopes of her early ministry — and she was not defeated by any of it. What she left was not a movement or an institution but a handful of books that have gone on quietly telling tired Christians that the burden was never theirs to carry.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Hannah searched for ten years in the wrong place — her own feelings. Where have you been looking for assurance?

2. She learned her deepest lesson from factory workers she had meant to teach. Whom have you written off as having nothing to teach you?

3. Consider a grief or disappointment of your own. Has it pushed you away from God or toward the question of what He is really like?

4. Pray by name for someone close to you who has walked away from the faith, as her husband and children did, without despair and without pretending.

5. Read the first chapters of The Unselfishness of God, where she tells this story in her own words.

A PRAYER

Lord, You were patient with a young woman who looked for You in all the wrong places, and You are patient with me.

Thank You that You are a fact before You are a feeling, and that You find us before we find You.

For those I love who have wandered, I ask not that You would make them like me, but that You would bring them home to You.

Keep me faithful when public hopes fall and private griefs come, and let me finish, as she did, cheerful and unafraid. Amen.