• Streetcar Incident
Streetcar Incident It was a warm spring afternoon in the early 1860s. The windows were open in the Pearsall Smiths' parlor, and the clear sun shone in on the bare, polished planks of the floor.
A group of several men and women were clustered around a study table, seated in straight chairs, deep in a discussion about the Word of God. The exchange of ideas was becoming heated, and Hannah, now a matron approaching her thirtieth birthday, was holding firm in her earnest manner.
"I do not see," she insisted, her face flushed with feeling, "how a good and loving God could condemn some sinners to eternal torment—while others, no more deserving, should receive the great blessing of salvation." And the feelings of the injustice of it all welled up within her. There were tears in her eyes.
"Mrs. Pearsall Smith," a teacher of the Plymouth Brethren answered sternly, "it says right here in Scripture—in Romans 8, verses 29 and 30, to be exact—that God has set apart and called certain people to receive the good news of the gospel. Everyone is not thus called. We must accept what we read in the Holy Scriptures."
"Forgive me for monopolizing the discussion," Hannah began again, "but this policy of saving only certain people
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seems inconsistent with the message of forgiveness that I so gladly received in my heart only a few years ago. The God I discovered with so much rapture in the summer of 1858 could not be so disappointing as to cast off a large portion of the creatures He has made with no thought for their final well-being."
Another lady, also a member of the fellowship of the Plymouth Brethren, whom Hannah had joined after her baptism, was becoming uncomfortable. Clearly, she was very disturbed at Hannah's line of reasoning. "Dear Mrs.
Pearsall Smith," she said sharply, "we are merely the creatures, not the Creator. It ill behooves us to interfere with the workings of the Almighty."
Here it was—not the first and certainly not the last of Hannah's head-on collisions with those who held, in various ways, to the doctrine of "predestination." To these
Christians, belief in God's sovereignty meant seeing God as a righteous judge more than as a loving father. Hannah felt that there was something wrong with the idea that some people were chosen for salvation, while others seemingly were destined for eternal damnation. Predestination seemed to show too little concern for the lost souls as far as Hannah was concerned. She was confused as the meeting came to an impasse. It was a stalemate of reasonings if not feelings—for the air had become quite charged with emotion. The leader, with a nervous cough, suggested it might be best to close the session with prayer. After this, the various ladies and gentlemen retreated to their separate homes.
Hannah returned to her corner of the sunny parlor, feeling anything but bright in spirit. She was alone now, and the house was quiet. Robert would not be home from work for some time. Frank was still in school. Unresolved doubts churned away in Hannah's mind: One theological issue had troubled her since childhood. How could she know that this same issue had fired bitter disagreements among theolo-
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gians for hundreds of years? She knelt by her chair, feeling heavy with distress.
"Oh, God," she implored, "how canst thou bear the misery that is caused by sin in this world? In face after face I see unveiled before me, in the marketplace and everywhere, the terrible weight of the suffering and misery that has been brought into the world by sin. It beats upon my spirit like the incessant battering of the waves upon the shore. Oh,
God, let me know somehow how thou standest to look upon the face of the earth and behold such awful sorrow. Oh,
Christ, I see in thy face a terrible pity over the sufferings of thy fellow human beings."
The turmoil was too much. She must know. "Oh, God, I cannot bear it," she prayed, beating her fists on the parlor chair at which she knelt. "Please please give me some ray of light, some illumination." 2
Tears continued streaming down her face when she rose some time later. But there was no more time for quiet prayer. She had a class to teach that afternoon at the Southern House of Industry, several miles across Philadelphia. Upstairs, she put on her black hat—the one she had specially devised with a heavy veil to cover her face. Hannah had taken to wearing this veil whenever she went out into the street because the sight of every strange face stirred in her such painful reflections on the lot of unrepentant sinners. As she hurried out of her house to catch the tramcar, she felt protected by the veil.
As she was riding the tram along Market Street, however, two men climbed aboard and sat down opposite her.
When the conductor came for his fare, she was obliged to raise her veil to count out the coins. And as she did so, she saw clearly the faces of the two men. A flood of anguish took her. The faces, once handsome, were worn down by time and heavy with cares—and besides the slow ravages of time on the face of humanity, Hannah imagined these faces lost in hellish fire forever, if these men were without Christ.
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Hannah clenched her hands and cried out in her soul, Oh, God, how canst thou bear it? I do not see how thou canst
. endure it. In this manner, she upbraided God, and felt justified in doing so.* When her turmoil was spent, though, an inner voice seemed to reply, in tones of infinite love and tenderness, It is not my will that any should perish but that all should come to eternal life.
To Hannah there came an awareness that there is to be a final restitution—that is, a making right of all that is wrong. That in the life to come, somehow all sinners shall come to the point where "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:10-11).
The how and why of it all she could not see, but this one assurance was all she needed—that somewhere and somehow God was going to bring into the fold all the creatures He had created.
It was a rare moment of inner illumination for Hannah.
She did not have many in her life, but the ones that came would overturn everything. And whereas the Quakers counted on receiving special guidance quite apart from the Scripture, it became a constant pattern for Hannah that when a shaft of spiritual illumination came her way, it fell on the Scripture, breathing life into it. As Hannah would later write, of mystical revelations—by which she meant those that did not involve Scripture: "For most of us, our trouble is that we have the wrong idea of what knowing
God is all about—or at least the kind of knowing I mean.
* Author's note: Hannah's extreme reaction to human sin and suffering may seem a bit bizarre. Most people don't go outside concealed by a heavy veil in order to avoid the sight of the everyday misery in the world. Ordinarily, Hannah was an emotionally stable person and she was not prone to peculiar behavior. However, her emotions were strained to the limit at this point in her life by the spiritual crisis she was facing. She could not reconcile her experience of God as a God of love with what she was hearing from the church—that God would consign unrepentant sinners to eternal hellfire. How could a merciful God do such a thing? Hannah's feeings at this time were over-sensitized by her own spiritual crisis.
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For I don't mean any mystical, interior revelations of any kind. Such revelations are wonderful, when you can have them—but they are not always at our command, and they are often shaky and uncertain.
. Inward revelations we cannot call to ourselves whenever we will, but anyone in possession of his senses can believe the thing that is written
[in the Word of God] .... This kind of knowing brings us convictions.
." 4
When she stepped off the tramcar, Hannah was a revitalized person. All through the class at the Southern House of Industry, Hannah's mind was in such a bright ferment that she could hardly wait to end her class and hurry home.
Her feet flew up the steps of the house on Tenth Street.
She must check out this wonderful discovery in the Bible to see if it had been there all the time and she had not seen it. And so she sat in her favorite nook in the parlor, Bible and concordance spread out in front of her. The whole book seemed to be illumined. For an hour she read passage after passage of Scripture. Then she closed her books and sat back in her chair, flooded with joy with the new peace that filled her.
Meanwhile, Robert had returned from work, and he and young Frank were talking in another room. The dinner hour was approaching.
Oblivious to all this, Hannah meditated on the new insights that were falling into place, like the simple stones in a spiritual footpath leading straight into the kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy she had longed for for years: God was not a selfish God, visiting His love only on some of His creatures; He was love in its very essence. Love was the very law of His being. She began to think that if her mother heart could love her own children whether they were bad or good, then God must have something like a mother's love too—only infinitely more vast and superior to her own. 5
She also saw that God's love was not just available for a few of His creatures, as was taught by most religious
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doctrines in her time, but that the sinners she had met in the street and in the tramcar were also God's precious children. She could not help but think that He loved them all, and she felt reassured that somehow He would see to it that not even the most hardened and depraved sinner would be lost forever.
It was not long afterward that Robert, always lavish with hospitality, was entertaining a celebrated preacher from Boston in their home. The Smiths, in fact, entertained a continuous procession of people with a wide range of religious ideas. On this particular morning, Hannah and Robert were seated at the breakfast table with the Boston clergyman when, with great gusto, the visiting minister started a discourse on the love of God.
"Of course God loves us," he intoned. "But there are limits to what His love can endure. Take mother love, for instance." And he pointed his spoon at Robert. "There are certain sins that a daughter can commit which her mother can never forgive."
Heedless of the scalp-prickling looks that were coming from Hannah, the man went right on. "Yes, there are some sins which are so heinous that if a daughter committed them, the mother would forever close her heart and her home to the child." Then he concluded triumphantly, "And so it is with God. His love goes only so far. And certainly anyone who believes that God will put up with continual sinning holds a senile view of religion."
To Robert's horror, Hannah rose to her feet, her face as white as a sheet, her eyes blazing. Her voice barely under control, she said, "I realize that you are my guest. But the honor of God seems more important to me than ordinary rules of politeness. I will not sit at a table with anyone who so maligns mothers and, even worse, maligns the God who made mothers! Your views of God are intolerable to me.
How can you live with yourself as a minister of the gospel and have such an un-Christian idea of the love of God?
"As a mother, I will never cease to love my children, no
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matter what they do. God—our loving God—has a heart of mother-love infinitely greater than mine. He never withholds His love from any sinner, no matter how blackhearted or unrepentant the person may be. His love is completely unconditional. Oh, it is too much. I cannot bear to hear a preacher of the gospel say such limited and untruthful things about the love of God."6
And here, Hannah lost control and burst into tears. Covering her face, she ran from the dining room.
Robert and the celebrated preacher sat in stunned silence, listening to the sound of Hannah's footsteps as she ran upstairs to her bedroom and slammed the door.