The Unselfishness of God

It is Hannah Whitall Smith's spiritual autobiography, tracing her long journey out of doubt and legal religion into the discovery that God is entirely good and entirely unselfish — that his whole heart toward his creatures is love. Through her own story of struggle and revelation, she leads the reader to rest in the character of a God who seeks not his own but the good of all he has made.

An American author and speaker of the nineteenth century, raised a Quaker, who became one of the best-known voices of the deeper Christian life. She is most famous for The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life; The Unselfishness of God, published in 1903, is her later, more personal book, telling the inward history behind her teaching.

That God is unselfish — that his very nature is to seek the good of his creatures rather than his own, and that this changes everything. Smith had been taught to fear a demanding, self-regarding deity; her great release came in seeing that God's whole disposition toward her was love, and that she could trust him utterly because he wills nothing but her good.

Chiefly of experience — it is her autobiography, the record of a real spiritual journey through doubt, disappointment, and discovery. But the experience is always in service of a truth about God's character, so the book teaches as it tells, letting her own path out of fear into rest become a way for the reader to follow.

The struggles of a sincere seeker: religious doubt, the coldness of a merely dutiful faith, disappointment with the harsh pictures of God she had been given, and the long search for something more real. Her honesty about these makes the book a companion for readers who have known the same difficulties, and her resolution offers them hope.

It is the personal story behind the teaching. Where the earlier book sets out the secret of a life of rest and trust, The Unselfishness of God tells how Smith herself came to it — the doubts overcome and the discovery of God's goodness that made such a life possible. Together they give both the doctrine and the biography of her faith.

Anyone wrestling with doubt, or with a fearful or joyless picture of God, and anyone seeking a more authentic and restful spiritual life. Smith writes warmly and candidly for the honest struggler, and her central discovery — that God is good and unselfish through and through — has brought relief to many who feared otherwise.

At the beginning, reading it as the life story it is — from her Quaker upbringing and early doubts through to the discovery that gives the book its title. Because it is a journey, it rewards being read in order, so that the reader arrives at the unselfishness of God by the same road Smith travelled to find it.