The Fourth Epoch In My Religious Life (the Life Of Faith)

It was in 1865 that the fourth, and by far the most captivating, epoch of my spiritual journey dawned upon my soul. I had been a Christian for nine years — years filled with delight and enchantment — but what now came to me was so far beyond all that preceded it that it felt as though an entirely new and magical world had opened before me.

During those earlier years, my faith had been thoroughly satisfying in everything relating to God.

Every discovery I made about His character and His ways brought me only joy. But when it came to my own part in the Christian life, the satisfaction was far less complete. I was happy, yes, but I was not the person I longed to be.

I had found a religion that promised perfect deliverance for the future, but it did not seem to offer deliverance now . I had found an unselfish and just God whom I could worship without fear of disappointment — but I was continually disappointed in myself. I knew I was not what I ought to be. My life felt full of failure — not so much outward sin, but inward sins: coldness, spiritual deadness, lack of Christian love, roots of bitterness, all those hidden failings over which God’s children so often grieve. When I wanted to do good, evil was present. The good I desired, I did not do; and the evil I despised, I still did. I found myself constantly sinning and repenting, making resolutions and breaking them, hating what was wrong yet yielding to it, longing for victory but more often failing than overcoming.

Yet Scripture seemed to teach that Christ came to bring a real and present victory to His followers. It implied that Christians were meant to be free from anxious cares and fears, and to enjoy even now a peace that surpasses understanding. But I knew painfully little of that. My heart was at rest about my future , but my present was torn by a thousand daily worries and anxieties. The very fruits of the Spirit — which I believed I had received — were love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, meekness, goodness; yet these were the very qualities in which I felt most deficient.

This was not what I had expected when I first became a Christian. Raised among the Quakers — whose lives radiated peace — and taught from childhood that goodness was essential, I had assumed that becoming a Christian necessarily meant becoming peaceful and good. I expected victory over sin and over worry as naturally as I expected the sun to rise. But in the secret depths of my soul, I had to admit that I was disappointed.

At first, the joy of my newfound salvation had swept everything else aside. I thought temptation and fear and sin were gone forever. But when the initial glow faded, the old temptations returned with their old power. It became as easy as ever to be anxious, worried, burdened, irritable, unkind, critical, and severe — to do and be all the things from which I believed religion would deliver me. None of this ever shook my conviction that I was God’s child and an heir of heaven, but it often made me feel miserably ashamed. To be a child of God and yet unable to live like one made me wonder whether I had missed something in the Christian life — something that could have brought me victory.

Determined to discover what that missing element was, I questioned several older Christians. But they all gave me the same answer: No, you have not missed anything. The life of sinning and repenting is all we can expect in this world, because of the weakness of the flesh. They explained that the old Adam, inherited at birth, and the new Adam, received at conversion, constantly warred against each other — sometimes one prevailing, sometimes the other — and that only in death would we find true deliverance from the old nature.

N othing could have described my condition better than Paul’s own lament in Romans 7:14– 23. It seemed written for me. Again and again I cried out with him, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” But I could not understa nd why Paul even asked that question if, as everyone said, there was no deliverance in this life. Surely he knew the old nature was destined to remain until death. Yet he not only asked the question — he answered it triumphantly: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

What could he have meant? I had entered into salvation through Jesus Christ, yet I knew nothing of such triumphant deliverance. I was still bound by the “body of death” within me.

Why? Where lay the difficulty?

These questions grew even more pressing after I discovered the unlimited love of God. It felt so ungenerous — almost ungrateful — to respond to His boundless unselfishness with such lack of spiritual fruit. Since He had shown Himself so mighty to save in the future, how could He be powerless in the present?

The Quaker lives around me also suggested there must be deliverance, for they claimed to have experienced it — even though they could never explain clearly what it was or how it worked.

Another influence strengthened this conviction. I owned a book that taught not only that God’s children were commanded to bear the fruits of the Spirit, but that they could do so — and that also offered hints of the mystical pathway toward it. The book was Spiritual Progress , a collection of selections from Fenelon and Madame Guyon. It was especially precious because it had been a gift from my adored father and always lay on my desk beside my Bible.

My father had discovered it when he was only eighteen. As he walked through Philadelphia on his way to board a ship for a long voyage to China, he passed a second-hand bookstall. Though he had only recently begun the spiritual life, he was drawn to the title Spiritual Progress .

Knowing nothing of its contents, he bought it on impulse — guided unconsciously, no doubt, by the Lord in whom he had begun to trust. He wrote in his Reminiscences: “This book proved to be of the greatest comfort to me. I carried it in my pocket and read it in spare moments, to my everlasting profit, I trust. I cannot but thank a kind Providence for placing this blessed book in my hands.”

My father valued that book so highly that as soon as each of us children was old enough, he gave us our own copy and asked us to study it carefully. Because we loved him so dearly, we always wanted to please him, and during the years of my first hungry and despairing search for God, the book became my constant companion.

But since it was written more to guide souls who were already progressing in the spiritual life than to help seekers enter that life in the first place, it wasn’t of much definite help to me during those early, blind years of searching. And when, in 1858, I came to believe I had discovered “the plan of salvation”— settled, as I imagined, in the councils of Heaven, revealed in the life and death of Christ, and neatly formulated by the Apostle Paul — I filled the margins of my copy with what I thought were decisive critiques proving the book’s unsoundness.

Still, without my realizing it, its teachings made a profound impression on me. Even while I criticized it, I felt an underlying hunger for the mystical side of religion that the book expressed.

Throughout the years that followed, I was pulled back and forth between the claims of Plymouth Brethren doctrine on one side and the claims of mysticism on the other.

The practical, businesslike part of my nature leaned toward the Brethren; my Quaker upbringing and the influence of my cherished book pulled me toward the mystical.

At times, doctrines seemed supr emely important and one’s actual life almost insignificant; at other times, doctrines felt worthless unless they resulted in a righteous life. Sometimes Paul held sway in my thinking — teaching salvation by faith — and sometimes James, insisting that faith without works is dead. My Plymouth Brethren friends exalted Paul and justification by faith; my Quaker friends and the Catholic saints in my book exalted James and justification by works. The practical part of me leaned to the first; the mystical side leaned to the second. The result was an ongoing restlessness of soul which, combined with my distress over my continual spiritual failures, often made me question whether what I had learned about the salvation of Christ could really be the whole story.

With no be tter remedy, I turned increasingly to “sound doctrine” to quiet my unrest. Under Plymouth Brethren influence, these doctrines had become very clearly defined, each one neatly labeled and stored away in the mental pigeonholes of my mind. Nothing could have been more orderly — at least as far as doctrines were concerned. I had become quite a successful teacher of these doctrines, and I looked down pityingly on anyone who was not as clear and definite as I was.

I often wished I could seat all the religious teachers I knew in a row of baby high chairs before me, so that I could explain to them the doctrines they seemed so confused about — especially justification by faith and the judicial standing of the believer . I regularly declared that if one simply understood these two points and believed them fully, then everything was all right and nothing else mattered much.

I remember saying something like this to a cousin who came to me distressed about her shortcomings in the Christian life. She said, “But Hannah, according to what you’re saying, all our sins — past, present, and future — are forgiven if we simply believe. It makes very little difference what we do.”

“Yes,” I answered in my ignorance, “and that is exactly the beauty of it! We wear the robe of Christ’s righteous ness, and that robe covers all the vileness underneath. When God looks at us, He sees not our unrighteousness but Christ’s righteousness, and He accepts us because of that.”

Another time, a Quaker preacher who had heard me expound these crude ideas said, “ It seems to me, Hannah Smith, that you talk as if you could walk into a ready-made clothing shop, buy garments of salvation, put them on immediately, and come out fully clothed in righteousness and ready for heaven.”

“Yes!” I replied. “That is exactly how it is —except I don’t have to buy the garments; Christ gives them to me! Thank you for such a beautiful illustration; I shall certainly use it in my preaching.”

I have no doubt I interpreted Plymouth Brethren teaching in a far more literal and external way than they ever intended. But I liked to have everything defined with absolute clarity, and this seemed the logical outcome of their views. Strangely, I failed to see how inconsistent it was to believe in a righteous God who supposedly covered up our unrighteousness with the robe of His own righteousness, and then pretended to Himself that we were fit for heaven — when He certainly knew that beneath the robe our “filthy garments” were still there.

Whenever my Quaker friends hinted at this inconsistency, I silenced my uneasiness by telling myself that although they were dear, good people, they were not doctrinal at all and knew very little about the “plan of salvation,” “justification by faith,” or the “judicial standing of the believer.” Their objections, there fore, were not worth considering.

However, after the discovery I had made of the vastness of God’s love , as described in my previous chapters, I began to feel increasingly uneasy. It seemed a most ungrateful response to such boundless love that we — its recipients — should fail so miserably in living the kind of life God clearly intended for us. The more I thought, the more inconsistent it seemed that salvation, which was ultimately to be so magnificent and complete, should fail so obviously now , in this present life, to provide the victory over sin and over worry that the gospel so plainly promises as its immediate result.

Why was it, I asked myself again and again, that the God who had planned such a glorious deliverance for us in the future had not also planned a better deliverance for us in the present?