Hannah Whitall Smith
(1832-1911)
Writer,
teacher, and social reformer. Hannah Whitall Smith was one of the outstanding
women in her time. Her best-known book, The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,
after appearing in her husband's magazine The Christian's Pathway of Power
(Feb. 1874-Jan. 1875) in serial form, was published by the Willard Tract
Repository, Boston, and Morgan and Scott, London, in 1875. It has gone through numerous
editions and been translated into most of the major languages of the world.
Born in Philadelphia in 1832, Hannah married
Robert Pearsall Smith, also a Quaker. They "joined successively the
Methodists, the Plymouth Brethren and the Baptists; and then they set out ...
to preach the Higher Life."
The Smiths both preached extensively in
Europe and played an important part in founding the Keswick Convention and
leading the Higher Life Movement, but severed their connections with it after
some years, and returned to America. After an unfortunate incident between
Robert and a young woman, he discontinued preaching and later abandoned his
faith entirely.
Hannah, however, continued preaching and
writing, and worked eagerly in the Women's Christian Temperance Movement and in
the Women's Suffrage Movement.
She and her husband returned to England
permanently in 1886, where she continued to write, and occasionally to
preach. In her widely disseminated
book, the secret of a happy, Christian life is explained as "a life of
inward rest and outward victory." It exists when a Christian is saved not
only from sin's "guilt" but "from the power and dominion of
sin." She speaks of "the infiniteness of God's power for destroying
that which is contrary to Him (which is 'sin')" and extols "God's
power," which "comes to help us and to redeem us out of sin."
Consistent with failures, and with temptation, it is an obtainment the believer
receives through faith, with consecration to God as a prerequisite to faith.
The Holiness Movement, stemming out of John
Wesley, has claimed Smith as a popularizer of its doctrine of entire
sanctification as a second definite work of grace. J. K. GRIDER
See also HOLINESS MOVEMENT, KESWICK
CONVENTION.