God of All Comfort

By Hannah Smith

More than a century before Rob Bell caused his controversy in Evangelical circles, Hannah Whitall Smith was already certain that love wins. An excellent resource for either book groups or personal study, this study edition of her classic work provides a new in-depth introduction that illuminates Smith’s life and offers chapter-by-chapter questions that encourage discussion and deeper thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anamchara Books
• Release date: Jun 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781933630090

Book preview

GOD of All Comfort

by

Hannah Whitall Smith

Introduction by Kenneth McIntosh

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978-1-933630-09-0

Published by Anamchara Books at Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 by Anamchara Books, a Division of Harding House Publishing Service, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.

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Contents

Introduction

1. Why This Book Has Been Written

2. What Is His Name?

3. The God of All Comfort

4. The Lord Our Shepherd

5. He Spake to Them of the Father

6. Jehovah

7. The Lord Is Good

8. The Lord Our Dwelling Place

9. Much More Versus Much Less

10. Self-Examination

11. Things That Cannot Be Shaken

12. A Word to the Wavering Ones

13. Discouragement

14. The Shout of Faith

15. Thanksgiving Versus Complaining

16. Conformed to the Image of Christ

17. God Is Enough

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Introduction

God of Comfort, Life of Trials

Many readers of spiritual literature are familiar with Hannah Whitall Smith due to her most famous book, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. However, few modern readers are aware of the challenges she faced and the achievements she garnered.

We always hope that a writer’s life will be congruent with her writings, but frequently we are disappointed. Not so with Hannah Whitall Smith. In her middle age and later years, she dealt with one misfortune after another, and though she struggled, as anyone would when dealing with dire issues, she kept her faith and maintained a largely positive outlook. Her favorite verse of Scripture was one taken from Job: Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.

Had she not penned several spiritual classics, Hannah would still deserve an honored place in history. Her teachings influenced the Holiness conventions (a popular movement of her day that in turn left lasting imprints on Pentecostal, Methodist, Wesleyan, and Christian Missionary Alliance churches). Her work preaching, evangelizing, and advancing political causes defied the circumscribed roles for women in the Victorian age, yet did so in a way that won over opponents of women’s equality. She was a creative theologian; in fact, some of her views are so novel that modern publishers have removed passages from her works in order not to offend theologically staid readers. Though she passed away almost a century ago, Hannah’s words are still fresh and relevant.

Quaker Childhood

Hannah Tatum Whitall was born February 7, 1831, in Philadelphia, the daughter of John and Mary Whitall. She later recalled having the most delightful father and mother that ever lived. The Whitalls loved their children unconditionally, and they lavished opportunities, affection, and wisdom on their offspring. Hannah’s positive experience with her parents was the foundation for a theology that viewed God’s nature as that of an unconditionally loving parent.

She wrote in her autobiography, The Unselfishness of God, My parents were strict Quakers, and until my marriage at nineteen, I knew nothing of any other religion. Like many people of faith, she appreciated the religion of her childhood more as she grew older, after her views of Christianity had gone through several other permutations. She said, Nearly every view of divine things that I have since discovered . . . had . . . their germs in the views of the Society (The Society of Friends, the official name of the Quaker church). Quaker principles, such as nonviolence, charity, and equality of men and women, continued to be important beliefs throughout her life.

As a child, however, Hannah Whitall was more impressed by the legalistic tendencies of the Friends church than by the broader principles she later learned to appreciate. She struggled with the requirement of wearing a sugar-scoop bonnet (named for its shape) and with prohibitions on reading fiction or listening to instrumental music. Her childhood impression of God was that He was a selfish, self-absorbed Being, conditional and demanding in His affections.

Conversion

At the age of sixteen, Hannah experienced her first spiritual awakening, due to the influence of her teacher and friend, Anna S (her surname is purposely omitted in Whitall Smith’s autobiography). Anna showed Hannah a book that expounded on the immensity of the universe and the grandeur of the Creator. This book ignited within Hannah a desire to become acquainted with the God who had created the unimaginable wonders of which I had been reading.

While convinced that God was great, she was unsure that God was either loving or merciful—so Hannah’s new experience of God’s grandeur led to a period of intense self-inspection, attempting to merit God’s favor. At the age of nineteen, she married Robert Pearsall Smith, who came from a Quaker background similar to hers. Her marriage did nothing to resolve her feelings of spiritual turmoil. After several years of marriage, she began to lose faith in God, struggling with the classic problem of evil: If God is entirely good and powerful, why does he allow people to suffer? Troubled by God’s inaccessibility and by intellectual doubts, at the age of twenty-four, Hannah pronounced, I am a skeptic.

In 1858, Hannah suffered the loss of her five-year-old daughter. While grieving, she attended a religious noonday meeting and felt that an inner eye seemed to be opened in my soul, and I seemed to see that after all God was a fact. Shortly after this, she was vacationing in Atlantic City where someone gave her a booklet containing the plan of salvation from the Book of Romans.

Readers with an evangelical Christian background are likely familiar with such tracts. It explained that all people are sinners needing salvation and that Christ died as a substitute to redeem them. To attain this redemption, one must simply believe. In The Unselfishness of God, Hannah wrote, The very crudeness . . . of the interpretation made it easy . . . to grasp. . . . It was a ‘plan of salvation’ that I could understand.

So, in August of 1858, she experienced what evangelicals call conversion or new birth. Her faith in God was restored— and her soul ignited. Later in life, however, she would note, I had only touched the surface of the spiritual realities hidden under the doctrines I so eagerly embraced.

International Fame

The Smiths’ Quaker companions were displeased by Hannah’s new beliefs, so she and Robert gravitated into Plymouth Brethren and Methodist circles. Doing so, they embraced Holiness doctrine: the belief that Christ not only saves one from condemnation for sin but also provides the ability to live victoriously each day of this life. Both Robert and Hannah were excellent speakers, and the Methodists encouraged them to speak at camp meetings.

In 1873 and 1874, the Smiths taught and evangelized in England, Germany, and Switzerland. Many people were opposed to women preachers, but Hannah ignored her critics. Both Robert and Hannah impressed the crowds with their eloquence and fervor, and both were hailed as great inspirational teachers. Robert wrote to his son in 1875, telling him, All of Europe is at my feet. Audiences were just as thrilled by Hannah’s plain, vigorous Bible lessons as they were by her husband’s sermons. During this period of her life, Hannah also helped begin the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Trials

Although the Smiths gained fame as religious speakers, their lives were plagued by losses and difficulties. In 1872, Hannah was faced with the loss of yet another child, this time her oldest son, Frank, who died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen. The next year, she gave birth to a stillborn baby and confided to a friend, Life with its failures has pressed upon me of late with the most unspeakable sadness.

Robert Smith was often more of a burden than a support for his wife. Throughout their marriage, he suffered frequent and deep fits of depression. His fame as a preacher in Europe bolstered his self-confidence, and during the three years the family traveled abroad evangelizing, his emotions brightened, but this happy time lasted only briefly.

In 1875, Hannah was vacationing alone in Switzerland when colleagues in Paris sent her a telegram: Robert is ill, come immediately. When she arrived, she learned he was not physically ill—but it might have been better if he had been. The Holiness conference leaders had fired Robert because he was involved in a sexual scandal. The Smiths returned to the United States, Robert fell back into his old depression, and eventually, he renounced his Christian faith.

Hannah had now suffered the loss of three children, the infidelity of her husband, the shame of scandal attached to the family name, and deep disappointment at Robert’s loss of faith, but her trials were not yet ended. In 1877, death again visited the Smiths; this time it was Little Ray, our youngest, our perfect little girl, who died at age eleven.

Robert was no comfort; having lost faith in God, he also abandoned his moral compass. For years, Hannah endured her husband’s ongoing affair with another woman, a mistress he called my polished female friend.

In the later part of her life, Hannah also faced disappointment with her surviving children. Her daughter Mary left her husband and abandoned her family, leaving Hannah to raise her daughters. The man Mary ran away with was a free-thinking artist, who influenced her to abandon belief in God. Hannah’s other daughter, Alys, married Bertrand Russell, who was famous as a brilliant and articulate atheist. Alys renounced her Christian faith a month after marriage.

The Unselfishness of God

There is an old truism that hard times will cause a person to lose faith or use faith. Faced with death, infidelity, and disappointments, Hannah Whitall Smith persevered in her faith.

The key to her spiritual survival was her solid conviction of God’s benevolent character. As she wrote in the introduction to her autobiography, To know God, as He really is, in His essential nature and character, is to have reached the absolute, and unchangeable, and utterly satisfying foundation, upon which, and upon which only, can be reared the whole superstructure of our religious life.

A significant element in Hannah’s faith was her belief in the final restitution of all things. She explained: The salvation is absolutely equal to the fall. There is to be a final ‘restitution of all things,’ when ‘at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.’ . . . [S]omewhere and somehow God was going to make every thing right for all the creatures He had created.

Most evangelical Christians in the nineteenth century and today reject this doctrine. Many of her admirers in the late 1800s were aware of Hannah’s beliefs, disagreed with her, yet continued to support her teaching and preaching ministry. Contemporary Christians have not dealt so congenially with this doctrinal view, and some evangelical leaders have warned against Hannah Whitall Smith’s books as the writings of a heretic. Others have promoted her written works—but removed crucial sections from them, in order to present her teachings as more orthodox.

One of the chapters that censors removed from Hannah’s autobiography bears the title of the entire book—The Unselfishness of God. In it, she wrote, I began to see that the wideness of God’s love was far beyond any wideness that I could even conceive of; and that if I took all the unselfish love of every mother’s heart the whole world over, and piled it all together, and multiplied it by millions, I would still only get a faint idea of the unselfishness of God. She concluded, Since I had this insight of the mother-heart of God, I have never been able to feel the slightest anxiety for any of His children; and by His children I do not mean only the good ones, but I mean the bad ones just as much.

Hannah’s faith enabled her to endure her children’s deaths, her husband’s infidelity, and the apostasy of her surviving children, by believing that in the end, all of them—without exception—would be safely gathered into the mother-heart of an unconditionally loving God.

The God of All Comfort

Though not as well known as The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, this book, The God of All Comfort, can truly be called a Christian classic. The title is a perfect description of the book’s contents, as it is an exposition of the character of God. It is not a how-to book as much as a God-is book.

Along with many others, I can attest to this work’s relevance. During the time when I wrote this preface, one of my adult children faced a serious illness, I struggled to find adequate employment, and my father deteriorated physically and mentally. Pondering the view of God’s nature that Hannah described has been a great encouragement during this difficult stage of life’s journey.

I hope that The God of All Comfort will also uplift you, providing a sense of deep security even in life’s most difficult times.

—Ken McIntosh, M.Div.

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Chapter 1

Why This Book Has Been Written

My heart is inditing a good matter; I speak of the things

which I have made touching the king.

—Psalm 45:1

I was once talking on the subject of religion with an intelligent agnostic, whom I very much wished to influence, and after listening to me politely for a little while, he said, Well, madam, all I have to say is this. If you Christians want to make us agnostics inclined to look into your religion, you must try to be more comfortable in the possession of it yourselves. The Christians I meet seem to me to be the very most uncomfortable people anywhere around. They seem to carry their religion as a man carries a headache. He does not want to get rid of his head, but at the same time it is very uncomfortable to have it. And I for one do not care to have that sort of religion.

This was a lesson I have never forgotten, and it is the primary cause of my writing this book.

I was very young in the Christian life at the time of this conversation, and was still in the first joy of my entrance into it, so I could not believe that any of God’s children could be as uncomfortable in their religious lives as my agnostic friend had asserted. But when the early glow of my conversion had passed, and I had come down to the dullness of everyday duties and responsibilities, I soon found from my own experience, and also from the similar experiences of most of the Christians around me, that there was far too much truth in his assertion, and that the religious life of most of us was full of discomfort and unrest. In fact, it seemed, as one of my Christian friends said to me one day when we were comparing our experiences, as if we had just enough religion to make us miserable.

I confess that this was very disappointing, for I had expected something altogether different. It seemed to me exceedingly incongruous that a religion, whose fruits were declared in the Bible to be love, and joy, and peace should so often work out practically in an exactly opposite direction, and should develop the fruits of doubt, and fear, and unrest, and conflict, and discomforts of every kind; and I resolved if possible to find out what was the matter. Why, I asked myself, should the children of God lead such utterly uncomfortable religious lives when He has led us to believe that His yoke would be easy and His burden light? Why are we tormented with so many spiritual doubts, and such heavy spiritual anxieties? Why do we find it so hard to be sure that God really loves us, and why is it that we never seem able to believe long at a time in His kindness and His care? How is it that we can let ourselves suspect Him of forgetting us and forsaking us in times of need? We can trust our earthly friends, and can be comfortable in their companionship, and why is it then that we cannot trust our heavenly Friend, and that we seem unable to be comfortable in His service?

I believe I have found the answer to these questions, and I should like to state frankly that my object in writing this book is to try to bring into some troubled Christian lives around me a little real and genuine comfort. My own idea of the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ is that it was meant to be full of comfort. I feel sure any unprejudiced reader of the New Testament would say the same; and I believe that every newly converted soul, in the first joy of its conversion, fully expects it. And yet, as I have said, it seems as if, with a large proportion of Christians, their religious lives are the most uncomfortable part of their existence. Does the fault of this state of things lie with the Lord? Has He promised more than He is able to supply?

A writer has said, We know what overadvertisement is. It is a twentieth-century disease from which we all suffer. There are posters on every billboard, exaggerations on every blank wall, representations and misrepresentations without number. What visions we have seen of impossible fruits and flowers grown from Mr. So-and-So’s seeds. Everything is overadvertised. Is it the same with the kingdom of God? Do the fruits which we raise from the good seed of the kingdom verify the description given by Him from whom we obtained that good seed? Has He played us false? There is a feeling abroad that Christ has offered in His Gospel more than He has to give. People think that they have not exactly realized what was predicted as the portion of the children of God. But why is this so? Has the kingdom of God been overadvertised, or is it only that it has been underbelieved; has the Lord Jesus Christ been overestimated, or has He only been undertrusted?

What I want to do in this book is to show, in my small measure, what I firmly believe, that the kingdom of God could not possibly be overadvertised, nor the Lord Jesus Christ overestimated, for eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him; and that all the difficulty arises from the fact that we have underbelieved and undertrusted.

I want, therefore, to show as best I can the grounds there are in the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ for that deep and lasting peace and comfort of soul, which nothing earthly can disturb, and which is declared to be the portion of those who embrace it. And I want further to tell, if this is indeed our rightful portion, how we are to avail ourselves of it, and what are the things that hinder. There is God’s part in the matter, and there is our part, and we must look carefully at both.

A wild young fellow, who was brought to the Lord at a mission meeting, and who became a rejoicing Christian and lived an exemplary life afterward, was asked by someone what he did to get converted. Oh, he said, I did my part, and the Lord did His.

But what was your part, asked the inquirer, and what was the Lord’s part?

My part, was the prompt reply, was to run away, and the Lord’s part was to run after me until He caught me. A most significant answer; but how few can understand it!

God’s part is always to run after us. Christ came to seek and to save that which is lost. Which of you, He says, having a hundred sheep, if you were to lose one of them, would not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost until you find it? And when you have found it, you lay it on your shoulders rejoicing. This is always the divine part; but in our foolishness we do not understand it, but think that the Lord is the one who is lost, and that our part is to seek and find Him. The very expressions we use show this. We urge sinners to seek the Lord, and we talk about having found Him. Have you found the Savior? asked a too-zealous mission worker of a happy, trusting little girl.

With a look of amazement, she replied in a tone of wonder, Why, I did not know the Savior was lost!

It is our ignorance of God that does it all. Because we do not know Him, we naturally get all sorts of wrong ideas about Him. We think He is an angry Judge who is on the watch for our slightest faults, or a harsh Taskmaster determined to exact from us the uttermost service, or a self-absorbed Deity demanding His full measure of honor and glory, or a far-off Sovereign concerned only with His own affairs and indifferent to our welfare. Who can wonder that such a God can neither be loved nor trusted? And who could expect Christians, with such ideas concerning Him, to be anything but full of discomfort and misery?

But I can assert boldly, and without fear of contradiction, that it is impossible for anyone who really knows God to have such uncomfortable thoughts about Him. Plenty of outward discomforts there may be, and many earthly sorrows and trials, but through them all the soul that knows God cannot but dwell inwardly in a fortress of perfect peace. Who so hearkeneth unto me, He says, shall dwell safely; and shall be quiet from fear of evil. And this is a statement that no one dare question. If we would really hearken unto God, which means not only hearing Him, but believing what we hear, we could not fail to know that, just because He is God, He cannot do other than care for us as He cares for the apple of His eye; and that all that tender love and divine wisdom can do for our welfare, must be and will be unfailingly done. Not a single loophole for worry or fear is left to the soul that knows God.

Ah, yes, you say, but how am I to get to know Him? Other people seem to have some kind of inward revelation that makes them know Him, but I never do; and no matter how much I pray, everything seems dark to me. I want to know God, but I do not see how to manage it.

Your trouble is that you have got a wrong idea of what knowing God is, or at least the kind of knowing I mean. For I do not mean any mystical interior revelations of any kind. Such revelations are delightful when you can have them, but they are not always at your command, and they are often variable and uncertain. The kind of knowing I mean is just the plain matterof-fact knowledge of God’s nature and character that comes to us by believing what is revealed to us in the Bible concerning Him. The apostle John at the close of his Gospel says, regarding the things he had been recording: "And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples which are not written in this book: but these are written that ye might believe