A short life of the author
Hannah Whitall Smith wrote one of the bestselling devotional books in the history of Christianity — The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875), a practical, warm, and disarmingly simple guide to spiritual peace that has been read by millions of Christians across denominational lines and that remains in print nearly 150 years after its publication. The book’s central argument — that the Christian life should be characterised by joy and rest rather than anxiety and struggle, and that this happiness is available to anyone willing to surrender their will to God — struck a chord with readers exhausted by the emotional demands of Victorian evangelicalism and has continued to resonate with every subsequent generation.
The Philadelphia Quaker
Hannah Whitall was born in 1832 into a prosperous Quaker family in Philadelphia. She was raised in the quietist tradition of the Society of Friends, with its emphasis on the Inner Light, silent worship, and plain living. In 1851, she married Robert Pearsall Smith, a glass manufacturer who shared her religious temperament.
In the 1860s, both Hannahs underwent an experience of spiritual transformation — what the Holiness movement called “entire sanctification” — that convinced them that a life of complete surrender to God’s will could free the believer from the power of sin and produce a state of perpetual spiritual joy. This experience formed the theological foundation of Hannah’s writing.
The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life
The book grew out of the Bible classes and devotional talks that Hannah gave to groups of women in the 1860s and 1870s. It was published in 1875 and was an immediate and lasting success. The book’s appeal lies in its combination of theological substance with practical simplicity. Hannah writes not as a theologian but as a friend — addressing the reader directly, acknowledging the difficulties of the spiritual life, and offering concrete advice on how to maintain faith in the face of doubt, discouragement, and the ordinary frustrations of daily existence.
Her central metaphor is surrender: the Christian life is like a journey in which the believer is a passenger in a vehicle driven by God. The passenger’s job is not to drive but to sit still and trust the driver. This metaphor — passive, feminine, anti-heroic — was revolutionary in a religious culture that emphasised struggle, effort, and moral self-improvement, and it appealed particularly to women who felt overwhelmed by the competing demands of domesticity and piety.
The Higher Life Movement
In the 1870s, Hannah and Robert became leading figures in the Higher Life movement, an interdenominational evangelical movement that taught the possibility of complete consecration and continuous spiritual victory. They spoke at the famous Broadlands and Brighton Conferences in England (1874–1875), which attracted thousands of evangelicals and influenced the Keswick Convention, one of the most important institutions in the history of British evangelicalism.
The movement was disrupted by scandal when Robert Pearsall Smith was accused of sexual impropriety during the Brighton Conference — an accusation that ended his public ministry and placed an enormous strain on the marriage. Hannah continued her religious work and broadened her interests to include women’s suffrage, temperance, and social reform.
Later Life and Writing
Hannah spent her later years in England, where her daughter Mary married the art critic Bernard Berenson and her daughter Alys married Bertrand Russell. Hannah’s circle thus included some of the most prominent intellectual figures of the era.
The God of All Comfort (1906) extended the themes of The Secret into the specific problem of suffering. The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It (1903) is her spiritual autobiography — a more intellectually honest and more interesting book than The Secret, tracing her journey through doubt, disillusionment, and an increasingly universalist theology that was at odds with the evangelical orthodoxy of her most famous work.
Collecting Smith
The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (Willard Tract Repository, Boston, 1875) in first edition is scarce — the book’s enormous popularity meant that early copies were read to pieces. Later editions were issued by numerous publishers. The Unselfishness of God (Fleming H. Revell, 1903) is a more personal and more revealing work.