Who Was Hannah Whitall Smith? Author of the Christian's Secret
Hannah Whitall Smith was an American writer and speaker who lived from 1832 to 1911. She grew up a Quaker in Philadelphia, searched for years for a faith that gave her rest, and found it in simple trust in God. Her book The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life (1875) became one of the most widely read Christian books of its century and is still in print. Through it, and through the meetings she spoke at in England in the 1870s, she helped shape the holiness movement and the teaching that grew into the Keswick Convention.
Her message fits in one line from that book: "man's part is to trust, and God's part is to work." Here's the story behind it.
A Quaker childhood
Hannah Tatum Whitall was born in Philadelphia on February 7, 1832. Her father, John M. Whitall, had been a sea captain before going into the glass business, and he became a prosperous manufacturer. Both parents were devout members of the Society of Friends. In her autobiography she describes a happy, strict Quaker home: plain dress, plain speech, the "sugar-scoop" bonnet, no fiction or music, and long silent meetings where Friends waited for the Spirit to move someone to speak.
She loved her father dearly, and after his death she wrote his life, John M. Whitall: The Story of His Life, from his journals and letters. She shows him as a man who waited on God before every decision and "made the Lord literally his partner" in business.
Years of searching
Hannah was a serious, questioning girl. At sixteen she was awakened to her need of God, and for years she tried to find Him through feeling and self-examination. Those were unhappy years. She later called them a time of "morbid self-introspection" that ended in an eclipse of faith.
In 1851 she married Robert Pearsall Smith, also from a Quaker family. They had seven children, and only three lived to grow up. The deaths of her children were the deepest sorrows of her life.
Around 1858 the clouds lifted. Through Christian friends among the Plymouth Brethren she saw that salvation rested on what God had said and what Christ had done, not on her feelings. She simply believed God's record, and peace came. In The Unselfishness of God, her autobiography, she calls this the second epoch of her religious life.
God was a terror to me, until I began to see Him in the face of Jesus Christ, when He became an unmixed joy.
The Unselfishness of God, Introduction
The secret
Assurance of forgiveness didn't end her struggle. She still lost, day after day, to temper, worry and sin. In the mid-1860s, partly through Methodist friends who taught that Christ could keep a believer from the power of sin, she made what she called "a discovery, not an attainment." Jesus would do for her what she couldn't do for herself, if she would hand herself over to Him and trust Him to do it.
That became the heart of her teaching. She wrote it out in articles for a magazine her husband edited, and they were gathered into The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life. The book patiently walks through every trouble a believer meets in learning to trust: consecration, faith, the will, guidance, doubts, temptation, failure. Its key chapter puts the whole matter in two sides:
To state it in brief, I would say, that man's part is to trust, and God's part is to work…
The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, God's Side and Man's Side
She was practical about it. She knew that many Christians waited for feelings before they believed, and she told them to act with the will instead:
It is not the feelings of the man God wants, but the man himself.
The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, Difficulties Concerning the Will
England and the holiness meetings
In the early 1870s Robert and Hannah went to England, where they spoke at a series of large meetings on the "higher life" at Broadlands, Oxford and Brighton. Hannah gave Bible readings at these meetings, and she was much loved as a teacher. These meetings helped lead to the first Keswick Convention in 1875.
The same year, Robert was accused of improper behavior and withdrew from public ministry. The couple returned to America. Robert never fully recovered his faith, and the family went through hard years. Hannah kept her trust in God, and she kept writing and speaking. She helped found the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and worked for its causes, and she supported women's suffrage.
In 1888 the family moved to England to be near their married daughter, and Hannah spent the rest of her life there. Her children became well known in their own right: Mary married the art historian Bernard Berenson, Alys married the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and Logan Pearsall Smith became an essayist.
Her later books
In her sixties and seventies Hannah wrote some of her best work. Every-Day Religion (1893) is a set of Bible readings on the common-sense faith of daily life. The Unselfishness of God (1903), written at seventy, tells her own story with humor and candor. And The God of All Comfort (1906) answers an agnostic who told her that Christians carry their religion "as a man carries a headache." Her answer was that discomfort comes from wrong ideas about God, and she ends with the lesson she learned last:
The last and greatest lesson that the soul has to learn is the fact that God, and God alone, is enough for all its needs.
The God of All Comfort, God Is Enough
In her autobiography she also tells how, in her later years, she came to hope that God's love would in the end restore all things. That view is set out in the chapter on "the restitution of all things," and readers should know it's there.
She died in England on May 1, 1911, at seventy-nine.
What she taught
Know God as He is. Most of our misery, she thought, comes from thinking God is harder or less loving than He is. Christ shows us what God is really like.
Surrender and trust. The Christian's part is to give himself wholly to God and to trust Him. God's part is to do the work of keeping and changing him.
The will, not the feelings. Faith is a choice. Feelings come and go, and they're no measure of what God has done.
God is in everything. Every trial can be one of "the chariots of God," carrying the believer nearer to Him.
Why she's still read
People still read Hannah Whitall Smith because she writes for tired Christians. She'd been one herself. She's warm, plain and often funny, and she gives a discouraged believer something to do today: stop fighting in your own strength, hand the matter to God, and trust Him with it.
Where to start
TheWay Library has six of her books, all free to read. Start with The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life. If you're anxious or discouraged, read The God of All Comfort next. For her own story, read The Unselfishness of God, and for her son Frank's, The Record of a Happy Life.
Our guide to Hannah Whitall Smith's books describes all six, and our collection of Hannah Whitall Smith quotes gathers her best lines. You'll find all her books on the Hannah Whitall Smith author page.