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Hannah Whitall Smith
God Is Enough
Slamming his hand down on the arm of the chair, her father made his declaration to the couple standing before him. “I will not have thee in my house any longer,” he bellowed, his eyes meeting his daughter’s. “Your ungodly doctrines are contaminating our family and have humiliated us amongst the Friends.” Her brother stepped forward, insisting that Hannah leave their father’s house and informing her that she was no longer welcome there or at her married sisters’ homes. Hannah stumbled out the door toward the carriage, her husband’s steadying grip on her arm. Branded a heretic and a disgrace and banned from her childhood home, she despaired of ever seeing her parents or her siblings again.
“Could Anything Be More Liberating Than That?”
Hannah Whitall strained against the Quaker sensibilities from the start. As a young girl, she resisted the demands of piety imposed by her elders, preferring instead to revel in the great outdoors. She struggled to reconcile the message she heard preached so often from the pulpit—a message of a dark world stained by sin—with her love of nature and the unbridled joy she experienced in the midst of God’s creation. “How could such an angry, harsh God have created such a beautiful world?” she wondered.
Hannah continued to grapple with the nature of God long after her marriage to Robert Pearsall Smith in 1851 and the birth of her first two children, Nellie and Frank. During the afternoons while the babies napped, she often wrote in her journal, pouring her doubts and questions into its pages: “I [feel] myself cut off from God entirely. I [feel] like a sinking boat, tossed about by a mighty tempest on the godless deep of life, listening with anguished ears to the falling away of its ever breaking shore.”1 Not only did Hannah struggle to define God, she also began to doubt his very existence.
When five-year-old Nellie died of a bronchial infection three days before Christmas in 1857, grief rocked Hannah to her core. But surprisingly, her daughter’s death proved to be a turning point in her faith. For the first time in two years, Hannah felt a sense of God’s presence in the months following Nellie’s death. “My precious child, my angel child, thou shalt indeed be, I trust, a link to draw me up to heaven,” Hannah wrote in her journal just three days after her daughter’s funeral.2
The following summer, determined to wrestle out her lingering questions, Hannah packed only one book when the family vacationed at the beach in Atlantic City: the Bible. Day after day, she sat in a lounge chair on the beach and immersed herself in Scripture while young Frank played in the waves. Finally, after weeks of searching for God’s truth, she turned to chapter five in the book of Romans and read this: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8 KJV). Suddenly the image of the harsh and impenetrable God vanished, replaced by a God of infinite love and grace. “While I was yet a sinner, Christ died for me. Could anything be more liberating than that?” she wrote later in her journal, reveling in her new freedom in Christ.3
Not long after her spiritual revelation, Hannah and Robert resigned their membership to the Society of Friends, and in 1859 Hannah was baptized by immersion at a Baptist church near her Philadelphia home. But while Hannah was at peace with her decision, her extended family—particularly her father, a devout Quaker—was appalled. They refused to accept her conversion and banned her, her husband, and their child from visiting. Devastated but undeterred, Hannah later wrote that although she was an outcast from her earthly father’s house, she was comforted by the fact that she was not cast out by her heavenly Father. Ultimately, after several years had passed, her father softened and reconciled with Hannah and her husband.
During the 1860s Hannah’s faith took another turn when she was introduced to the increasingly popular Methodist holiness movement. The Smith family had weathered several difficulties, including Robert’s financial ruin and his subsequent breakdown, which resulted in a move from Philadelphia to a small town in New Jersey. Distanced from her church, Bible study, and friends, and exhausted from caring for her ill husband and her children (she now had five), Hannah struggled to find a spiritual home in New Jersey. When her dressmaker encouraged her to attend a Saturday evening holiness meeting with the local factory workers, Hannah, out of desperation, agreed. Initially she assumed the working-class people wouldn’t have anything to offer her, but she was soon proved wrong. In those humble meetings and among those humble people, Hannah found the real Christianity for which she had always longed.
As she settled into her newfound religion, however, Hannah hit a roadblock. Followers of the holiness movement emphasized what was known as the “second blessing”—an experience that indicated the palpable presence of the Holy Spirit. Pray as she might for such an experience, Hannah was left without this conviction. She watched with a mix of joy and envy as her husband was transformed by the second blessing at a Methodist camp meeting during the summer of 1868. But although she felt on the verge of such a blessing, Hannah was never completely overcome with emotion, the clear sign that a baptism of the Holy Spirit had occurred. She often approached the altar with a handful of handkerchiefs, prepared for an onslaught of tears that never materialized. Why didn’t she succumb to overwhelming emotion like so many others at the camp meetings? she wondered. She worried her lack of emotion made her less faithful and perhaps was an indication that she was not a believer at all.
Finally, after two years of relentless praying, Hannah concluded that the second blessing and its accompanying emotional response was simply the reaction of those with a more emotional disposition like her husband. To those with a rational, practical nature such as herself, spiritual truth was imparted as a growing conviction about the truth of the Gospels rather than a feeling. Hannah later explained this reasoning in her bestselling book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life:
I am convinced that throughout the Bible the expressions concerning the “heart” do not mean the emotions, that which we now understand the word “heart,” but they mean the will, the personality of man, the man’s own central self, and that the object of God’s dealings with man is that this “I” may be yielded up to Him, and this central life abandoned to His entire control. It is not the feelings of the man God wants, but the man himself.4
The Woman Preacher: “A Traveling Barnum’s Hippodrome”
Life grew increasingly difficult for the Pearsall Smiths during the 1870s. In August of 1872, their eighteen-year-old son Frank died of typhoid fever while the family was vacationing. That fall, Robert suffered a serious nervous breakdown, which led to the family’s move to Clifton Springs, New York, where Robert was admitted to a sanatorium. While her husband recovered, Hannah wrote her first book, The Record of a Happy Life, about Frank’s life, which was published and became a bestseller by 1874.
In 1873 Robert traveled to England per his doctor’s orders. Hannah, pregnant at age forty-one with her seventh child, stayed behind and was surprised to hear that her husband, instead of resting in his time abroad, had embarked on a rigorous preaching schedule. Their baby, a girl, was delivered stillborn in August 1873. In the midst of her grief, Hannah threw herself into the public eye, not only writing but also speaking and preaching regularly in Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
When Robert, whose ministry in England had grown exponentially, urged Hannah to join him in Great Britain, she and the children set sail. By 1875 Robert was known internationally as a preacher in the holiness movement, and Hannah’s reputation as a writer and speaker was growing as well. Still, she dreaded the hectic schedule. En route to England for the Brighton Conference in 1875, Hannah wrote to her sister, “I cannot tell thee how dreary the showlife I have to live this summer looks to me. . . . I feel just as if I were a sort of traveling Barnum’s Hippodrome with a ‘woman preacher’ on show instead of a tight-rope dancer.”5
However, Hannah didn’t have the luxury or the time to bemoan her circumstances. With a deadline looming, she battled seasickness to write most of The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life aboard the steamer, a book she later admitted hadn’t inspired her and was a burden to write. The book was published in 1875 and has since sold millions of copies. Hannah often pointed to the book’s success as evidence that feelings and inspiration weren’t as critical as faithfulness.
More than eight thousand people from all over the world attended the Brighton Conference that year. Hannah led two Bible study sessions each day, with between two and three thousand people attending each session, while Robert preached to thousands. A few weeks after the conference ended, however, scandal erupted when a British newspaper reported that Robert had engaged in inappropriate relations with a young female follower. The scandal destroyed Robert’s reputation and career as a preacher. As a result, he experienced yet another nervous breakdown, becoming so weak and mentally fragile that Hannah could hardly rouse him from his bed in their hotel room to board the ship bound for America. By the time the couple returned to Philadelphia, disgraced and humiliated, Robert’s faith had virtually vanished, and Hannah was assuaged by doubt and depression.
God Is Enough
Although she was still speaking and leading Bible studies, Hannah felt like an imposter. She spent hours analyzing her own words in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, determined to find an answer to her most pressing question: why had God allowed this scandal to happen? For two years, between 1876 and 1878, her letters returned again and again to her questions and doubts. Still, she persevered in her faith and refused to give up on her God. While her husband abandoned Christianity in favor of Buddhism and continued to pursue adulterous relationships, Hannah surrounded herself with other Christians in an attempt to buoy her own faith. Slowly she grew more confident. “One thing I know, and that is that I am all the Lord’s and that His will is infinitely and unspeakably sweet to me,” she wrote to a friend in 1878. “And like a poor little child who has lost its way, I creep into the dear arms of my Father and just ask Him to carry me, since I cannot understand His directions. He doeth all things well and I can leave myself with Him.”6
Hannah Whitall Smith went on to become a leader in the temperance and women’s suffrage movements and an advocate for women in education. She also spoke and wrote about her faith and published several more books in her later years, including Everyday Religion, or, The Commonsense Teaching of the Bible; her spiritual autobiography The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It; and God of All Comfort.
Hannah Whitall Smith’s critics have noted that the title of her most famous book, The Christian’s Secret to a Happy Life, is ironic, given the difficulties she faced throughout her life. Why take advice from someone whose life was so fraught with disappointment? you might ask. How is Hannah Whitall Smith’s life a model for happiness? She dealt with the deaths of her children; her husband’s mental health issues, his multiple infidelities, and their increasing estrangement; her daughter Mary’s scandalous affair and subsequent divorce; her daughter Alys’s depression and suicide attempt; and a prolonged custody battle for her two grandchildren. Yet in spite of these challenges, Hannah persevered in her faith, growing more confident in God’s love as she aged.
The final words of her last book, published five years before her death, are a simple but powerful testament of her faith. “God is enough!” she wrote. “God is enough for time. God is enough for eternity. God is enough!”7 It’s true, Hannah Whitall Smith’s understanding of happiness may not be typical, especially by modern standards. She understood that happiness was not created by success or fame, a perfect marriage, good health, or any of the parameters we often use to define it, but was in God alone.