1. Devotional exercises. I. Hazard, David.

Verses marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.

6820 Auto Club Road, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55438 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Hannah Whitall, 1832-1911 Safe within your love / Hannah Whitall Smith ; arranged by David Hazard. p. cm. — (Rekindling the inner fire) 1. Devotional exercises.

I. Hazard, David.

II. Title.

Ill. Series

BV4832.2.55477

242—dc20 92—

ISBN 1—55661—301—6

Cie

To Aaron, Joel and Sarah Beth I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.

3 JOHN 4 Pa a4 ee |

Rekindling the Inner Fire Devotional Senes Early Will I Seek You Augustine You Are My Hiding Place Amy Carmichael A Day in Your Presence Francis of Assisi Safe Within Your Love Hannah W. Smith

Foreword Hannah Whitall (White-all) Smith once confessed that her spiritual writings were begun under extreme protest—as she put it, "at bayonet-point." She never intended to record the spiritual "secrets" that gave her comfort in the midst of desperate and painful circumstances. If her husband and a religious publisher had not hounded her for months, Hannah would never have penned the manuscript in 1875 that was destined to become a classic: The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life.

The monumental success of this book, which has brought spiritual life to many millions of Christians for generations, was as unexpected as the other turning points of Hannah's life—for many alarming losses lay ahead. It was the depths of faith she discovered in her losses that led other spiritual wanderers out of darkness toward the flame of God's love.

In the 1860s, Robert Pearsall Smith, Hannah's husband, rose to international acclaim as an evangelist. A few years before, Hannah had left the Quaker Meeting of Philadelphia she was born into in 1832. This infuriated the Whitall family.

Her parents had always been liberal in allowing Hannah to seek answers on her own—but then they'd had no idea her questioning would lead her out of their fold. Hannah's father threw her out of his sitting room into the streets. Only months of tearful pleadings by her mother repaired the relationship.

Robert had likewise abandoned his Quaker upbringing. Quickly, he found fame as a preacher of "the second blessing" of the Holy Spirit, and Hannah was unwillingly pulled into the limelight after him.

For one thing, she was a young wife and mother with small children in-tow. At a deeper level, privately, she labored with guilt. She distrusted the razzle-dazzle emotionalism that seeped into some of the "spiritual revivals" then taking place in the U.S. and Europe. She felt there was too strong an emphasis on the supernatural, and she sensed—before she could articulate her feelings—that gauging true spirituality by dazzling experiences would backfire for too many new believers. To her, all these revelations, speaking in tongues, and personal prophecies were a spiritual trap if converts were not led to a deeper basis for their faith.

At that time, Hannah was in her early thirties, and she'd already sought God down several paths after leaving the Quaker Meeting. One spiritual movement after another swept the young nation. Independence was the spirit of the age, and churches splintered off from one

another and spread like prairie flowers across America.

Hannah had turned away from the mystical pull of "Quietism" taught by their own Quakers—but what should replace it? She viewed the fatalistic doctrine of predestination spread by the strict Calvinists as a total misunderstanding of the ways of God. She watched the surges of "holiness" among Baptists and Plymouth Brethren lead to long lists of legalisms. And now Robert was caught up in these outbursts of supernatural gifts (which predates the Azusa Street revivals by decades).

There was even a rudimentary "faith movement," which insisted that Christian victory meant freedom from illness and poverty—that is, it promoted success in the material world as opposed to spiritual victory over the world-bound soul.

For Hannah, something solid and basic and true was missing in each of these popular movements of her day. Some were obviously too rigid and lifeless, while in others she saw that spirituality was bypassed in favor of a carnival sideshow. Robert, who was given to mood swings and favored with a gift of rhetoric, was riveted to this "outpouring" of the Holy Spirit.

What was it Hannah so deeply longed for? She could not put it into words, and this infuriated the high-strung Robert. Gradually she felt herself detached from most Christians and sadly isolated from her own husband.

Meanwhile, Robert and his friends pressured o

Hannah to seek "the second blessing," by which they meant "the baptism in the Holy Ghost." For weeks, on her knees, Hannah tried. Nothing supernatural came of it. Robert was embarrassed by Hannah and privately told her that, emotionally, she was nothing but "a dry stick."

And yet. . :

It was true that Robert's charismas beamed from pulpits across the land. But it was to "dull"

Hannah that Robert and many of his individual followers secretly turned one by one when their supernatural experiences began to dim. Later, other Christian "friends" would blame Hannah for not "praying in faith" when their five-year-old daughter died of scarlet fever. But Hannah saw this brand of "faith" as heresy—she viewed it as "faith in faith," a counterfeit of the deep true knowing of God that she hungered for.

As Hannah would later write, in the plainspoken manner that characterizes all her works, mystical revelations and supernatural answers to prayer are wonderful "when you can manage to have them." But, she observed, "You cannot always drum one up at the moment you need it."

All the condemnation that Robert and others heaped on Hannah drove her from one spiritual

"in" circle after another. To her, their intense super-spirituality seemed only a big emotional splash, followed by months of little experiential ripples petering away to near nothing. But where was she to turn? She could not return to flatfooted fundamentalism. For as she wrote later,

"There is a great deal of longing and hoping among this generation of Christians"—by which she meant mental assent to the truths in the Bible—"but there is not much of knowing God himself."

In a way, Hannah was pushed out of the various societies of the faithful and forced on a lonely way .

. straight into the arms of her heavenly Father.

Alone with God one summer, something happened. The very words of the Bible became illuminated to her. She lost her tolerance for doctrines, or for rules, or for the mere history of the Bible stories. It was as if the vellum pages of her leather-bound Bible became a thin veil that she was able to look through and see glimpses of her Father in heaven. Here were the few granite truths on which she would stake her sacred faith.

It was as if she'd had one of those dramatic revelations: Hannah saw the goodness of God; she took in the wonder of His Fatherhood; she understood that He is magnificent enough to turn all the evil that arrows into the lives of His children into utter good if we but place all circumstances into His tender hands. She had found her way through mists of doctrine into a knowledge of God himself.

Robert was publishing a newsletter for the growing throngs of supporters across the nation and overseas. He besieged Hannah until she gave in and wrote a series of articles about these spiritual "secrets" she was learning—and she was

learning them in the nick of time.

Everything Hannah claimed she had discovered about the Christian's secret of a happy life was about to be tested in destruction and fire.

In the summer of 1875, Robert began a months-long tour of churches throughout England and much of Europe. He'd been pressing

Hannah to write a few articles for the newsletter he mailed to ardent followers—and these short pieces had been collected by the Fleming H.

Revell Company in New Jersey as the basis for a book. On the ship bound for England, Hannah was worn down by seasickness and by Robert's pressure, and she consented to finish the manuscript. This she mailed back to the States when they arrived in London.

Now, the great irony. The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life rapidly became a bestseller back in the United States, raising its still-absent author to celebrity status. The publisher's telegrams were ecstatic. And during the European tour, Robert was found in the bedroom of a female admirer.

It's possible that he was only offering "spiritual counsel," as he insisted. But in those days even the sniff of a scandal brought disgrace.

Church doors suddenly slammed in their faces. Friends abandoned them. Cabled messages denounced Robert back home long before he could return to defend himself.

And so Robert's star set at the very moment Hannah's own began to rise. He returned to America, where he suffered a nervous a2

breakdown. She returned to an outcry for more of her writings.

At the urging of a few friends, Robert made one halfhearted attempt to regain his footing in the American churches. But now he was an embittered man, given more to moods and depressions than ever before. Eventually, his bleak emotions became a permanent state of doubt. He gave up preaching, and his faith ebbed out.

Once a brilliant superstar of the pulpit, Robert now sulked around the house, muttering dark agnosticisms. Or else he went out on long walks that led him, as Hannah was soon to discover, to the parlors of several "lady friends."

Hannah had already lost another child, her most devout one, Frank, to scarlet fever when he was just eighteen. Now Robert weedled around their remaining three children—Logan, Alys, and Mary—attempting to win them over to his side of unbelief. The war in spirit had now invaded

Hannah's once-peaceful, once-Christian homelife.

From this time on, you might view Hannah's life as a string of disasters: One daughter would abandon her husband and run off with an artist; another daughter married one of the most outspoken atheists, Bertrand Russell; Robert continued to visit his mistresses. Hannah herself was plagued with a burning arthritis. And, like so many great souls of the church before her, she would be openly denounced. On one occasion she had a wet towel slapped across her face as

she spoke to a crowd. But Hannah did not view these things, painful as they were, as defeats.

One by one, it seems that God removed from Hannah all possible attachments to the world.

And still the words of Scripture were alight with "sanctified common sense." In response to all her

"losses," Hannah attached herself more firmly than ever to Him whom she saw as utterly good and unselfish in all His ways. She would write:

God alone is unchangeable. What we call spiritual blessings are full of the element of change.

The prayer that is answered today may seem to be unanswered tomorrow. The promises once so gloriously fulfilled may cease to have any apparent fulfillment.

. But when all else is gone, God is left and nothing changes Him .

. the soul that finds its joy in Him alone will suffer no wavering. (Everyday Religion) Hannah wrote other books: The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It and Everyday Religion among them. Then she retired to Oxford, England, where she affirmed a few years before her death in 1911 these closing words to her last book, God of All Comfort: "Nothing can separate you from [God's] love, absolutely nothing.

God is enough for time, and God is enough for eternity. God is enough!"

In all of Hannah's writing, as in her life, nothing stands out so brightly as the light of God

the Father as she met Him—in all His sweet goodness, so totally unselfish. Her conviction that God was purely loving in all His ways was the only great "spiritual secret" she would ever cling to, to the end. Ona spring day in 1911, she was "gathered" to God, as the Quakers put it.

Hannah, who longed to know God above all else, has left us with an urgent question: Who can hold back from giving oneself totally to a Father who loves us so dearly?

Work on this volume of the "Rekindling" devotional series was greatly helped by two generous friends. Barbara Halpern, Hannah's direct descendant, allowed me permission to quote from unpublished correspondence. And Marie Henry, who supplied several out-of-print books, gave invaluable insights into Hannah's private life through her wonderful biography of Hannah.

As with the other works in this series, the arrangement, phrasing, and editing are mine, as are the prayers that close the day's entry. Since

Hannah preferred the customary Quaker "thees" and "thous" in personal correspondence, they are intact in those entries.

May Hannah's life—and her intense conviction that God is first and always on our side, turning all pain and evil to our good—set in you a new burning to know God. And may you find for yourself that God longs to keep you, no matter your circumstances, safe within His love.

David Hazard July 1992

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