The Work
The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life was first published in 1875 by Fleming H. Revell, Boston. It grew from a series of articles Hannah Whitall Smith had contributed to The Christian's Pathway of Power, a British holiness periodical, and from addresses she gave at higher-life conventions in England and America. The book is approximately 250 pages, organized thematically around the obstacles and helps to a life of full surrender to God. It became one of the best-selling Christian books of the nineteenth century and has remained continuously in print for 150 years, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. A companion volume, The God of All Comfort (1906), deepened its themes in the context of Smith's own later sufferings.
The immediate context was the Keswick Convention movement, which began in England in 1875 - the same year the book was published - and promoted a 'higher Christian life' of full consecration, rest in God, and victory over habitual sin. Smith and her husband Robert Pearsall Smith were central figures in the early Keswick movement, and the book reflects the theological emphases of that tradition: the inadequacy of striving, the sufficiency of faith, and the transforming power of complete surrender to God.
Biblical Engagement
Isaiah 26:3 - 'Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee' - provides the book's central promise and its governing image. 'Perfect peace' is not an occasional spiritual high but the normal condition of a soul that has learned to keep its mind stayed on God. Smith argues that the instability and anxiety of most Christian experience reflects not a deficiency in God's provision but an incompleteness in the believer's trust.
Romans 5:1 - 'Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ' - grounds the possibility of the happy life in the objective reality of justification. Smith distinguishes between peace with God (the objective state of those who are justified) and the subjective experience of peace that flows from fully appropriating this objective reality. Most Christians have the first without fully experiencing the second, and the gap is not theological but practical: they have not fully surrendered their wills to God.
Philippians 4:6-7 - 'Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus' - provides the practical prescription: anxiety is to be replaced, not suppressed, by prayer and gratitude. Smith is a practical psychologist of the spiritual life: she does not simply command joy but teaches how to cultivate it through specific practices of prayer, thanksgiving, and deliberate attention to God's character.
John 15:11 - 'These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full' - establishes that full joy is Christ's explicit intention for his disciples. Smith uses this verse to challenge the assumption - embedded in much Victorian piety - that suffering and gloom are somehow more spiritually serious than joy. Christ came to give joy, and the absence of joy in a Christian's life is not evidence of deep spirituality but of incomplete faith.
The book also engages extensively with Hebrews 4's theology of 'entering into rest': 'There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God' (Hebrews 4:9). Smith interprets this as a present-tense reality available to every believer who will cease from their own works and trust entirely in God's working. The 'secret' of the title is simply this: God is entirely sufficient, and the Christian life becomes happy precisely when the believer stops straining and starts resting.
Author and Context
Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911) was born in Philadelphia into a prominent Quaker family. Her early religious life was marked by anxiety and doubt, and her account of discovering the possibility of a sustained peace and happiness in God makes her testimony the implicit narrative thread of the book. She married Robert Pearsall Smith in 1851; they became prominent figures in the American holiness movement before moving to England, where their conventions in Brighton and Oxford in 1875 were decisive events in the emergence of the Keswick movement.
Hannah's personal life was marked by tragedy that deepened the book's credibility. Her son Frank died in infancy. Her daughter Mary became a controversial figure in intellectual and religious circles. Her husband Robert suffered a serious moral failure - the nature of which has been disputed but which effectively ended his public ministry in England in 1875. Hannah went on to raise their grandchildren after Mary's death and lived until 1911, writing and speaking widely on both religious and social reform topics.
She was an active suffragist and temperance advocate, and her religion was always socially engaged: the God who gives peace is also the God who demands justice. This combination - mystical surrender and practical activism - was characteristic of the Quaker tradition in which she was formed and distinguished her holiness theology from the quietism of some continental mystical traditions.
Themes
The book's dominant theme is the distinction between striving and trusting. Most Christian misery, Smith argues, comes from the attempt to manufacture spiritual states by personal effort - attempting to feel joyful, to believe harder, to resist sin by willpower. The secret is to surrender the will to God completely and then trust that God will work in and through the surrendered will. This is not passivity - Smith is emphatic that the surrendered Christian remains fully active in obedience - but it is a different quality of activity: co-operation with God rather than competition with one's own limitations.
A second theme is the sufficiency of God's character as the ground of trust. Smith leads readers through a sustained meditation on the names and attributes of God - his faithfulness, his love, his wisdom, his power - arguing that the obstacles to a happy life are not external circumstances but internal failures to take God at his word. Every circumstance of life, however difficult, can be trusted to the God who is both sovereign and good.
Reception
The book was immediately successful on both sides of the Atlantic. It became the devotional companion of the Keswick movement and was embraced by figures as diverse as D.L. Moody (evangelical), Andrew Murray (Reformed), and later A.W. Tozer (deeper life). Its influence extended well beyond its Quaker-holiness origins into mainstream evangelical and even Catholic devotional circles.
Legacy
The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life occupies a foundational position in the tradition of popular evangelical devotional literature. It established the genre of the practical guide to spiritual happiness - a genre that extends through Andrew Murray's Abide in Christ (1882), A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God (1948), and John Piper's Desiring God (1986). Its central insight - that the Christian life is fundamentally about receiving rather than achieving, resting rather than striving - has proven perennially relevant across every generation of evangelical and holiness Christianity.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Isaiah 26:3 (perfect peace for those whose minds are stayed on God), Romans 5:1-5 (peace and hope through justification), Philippians 4:4-7 (the path from anxiety to peace), Hebrews 4:1-11 (entering into rest), John 15:1-17 (abiding in Christ as the condition of fruit and joy), and Matthew 11:28-30 (the easy yoke).
Further Reading
- Marie Henry, The Secret Life of Hannah Whitall Smith (1984) - a sympathetic biography that does not avoid the difficult dimensions of her personal story. - Steven Barabas, So Great Salvation: The History and Message of the Keswick Convention (1952) - the standard account of the movement in which Smith's book was so influential. - Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ (1882) - the theological companion to Smith's book, developing the same themes from a Reformed rather than Quaker framework.