The God of All Comfort

It is Hannah Whitall Smith's warm answer to a searching question: why do so many Christians carry their faith like a heavy burden rather than a source of rest? Stripping away the exhausting layers of religious effort, she sets out the true character of God as good, loving, and utterly trustworthy, and invites the anxious believer into the comfort and rest that flow from knowing him as he really is.

An American author and speaker of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, raised a Quaker, who became one of the most influential voices of the higher Christian life. Best known for The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, she wrote this later book, published in 1906, on the comfort and rest available to the believer who truly trusts God's goodness.

That God's own character — his goodness, love, and faithfulness — is the ground of all real comfort, and that many Christians are burdened simply because they do not know him as he is. Smith presses the reader to rest not in their feelings or performance but in the settled truth of who God is, and so to exchange anxious religion for peace.

Because they misunderstand God, picturing him as harsh or hard to please, and so treat their faith as a wearying effort to satisfy him. Smith argues that this false picture is the root of much Christian anxiety, and that seeing God's true, unfailing goodness dissolves the burden and lets the believer rest in his care.

It is a companion to that famous book and presses the same heart-truth from another angle. Where The Christian's Secret sets out the life of trust and surrender, The God of All Comfort dwells on the character of the God we are to trust — grounding the life of rest in the goodness of the One in whom we rest.

No — the comfort Smith describes rests on truth, not mood. It comes from knowing God's real character, so it holds firm even when feelings fail or circumstances darken. She is concerned to move the reader off shifting emotions onto the solid ground of who God is, so that their peace has a foundation that does not move.

For any Christian who finds their faith a burden rather than a rest, who is anxious, weary, or troubled by a fearful picture of God. Smith writes with unusual warmth and directness for such readers, and the book has brought relief to many by turning their eyes from their own effort to the goodness of the God of all comfort.

At the beginning, letting Smith address the burdened, joyless religion so many carry, before she unfolds the true character of God that answers it. The book builds its case warmly and in order, and is best read slowly and applied, since its comfort is meant to be entered into and rested in, not merely understood.