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Hannah Whitall Smith’s Highway of Holiness

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Quakers and Mysticism

Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism ((INTERMYST))

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Abstract

Spencer traces the spiritual development and mystical consciousness of Hannah Whitall Smith, nineteenth-century American Quaker, prominent devotional writer, and Holiness preacher. Based on her autobiography, diary, and carefully archived letters, Spencer explores her Quaker roots, evangelical conversion, transatlantic ministry, exploration of new religious movements, and lifelong fascination with the meaning of spirit baptism. Spencer shows how she integrated the mysticism of the historic Quaker tradition, the writings of the French Quietist Jeanne Guyon, the Wesleyan Holiness Movement, and other emerging forms of spirituality in the Victorian era into a final embrace of a practical, rational mysticism that incorporated all her so-called heresies including her reconciling of God’s love and justice in the “restitution of all things,” a Christian universalism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hannah Whitall Smith, Every-Day Religion (NY: Fleming H. Revell, 1893), 164.

  2. 2.

    “Letter to Anna Shipley,” August 5, 1877, Smith Collection, B. L. Fisher Library, Asbury Seminary, Wilmore, KY.

  3. 3.

    “Letter to Sarah,” 1878 (day and month not noted), B.L. Fisher Library, Wilmore, KY.

  4. 4.

    Letter to Sarah, 1878.

  5. 5.

    Hannah Whitall Smith, The Unselfishness of God: A Spiritual Autobiography (New York, NY: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1903) 281.

  6. 6.

    In 1827 Philadelphia Quakers split into two branches, Orthodox and Hicksite (and soon all American Quakers followed). The causes of the separation are complex, both sociological and theological. The Orthodox considered themselves more “traditionally Christian” but both groups continued to follow Quietist ways.

  7. 7.

    Letter to Anna Shipley, August 8, 1876. Smith Collection, B. L. Fisher Library, Wilmore, KY. Also found in similar form in her spiritual autobiography, Unselfishness of God, 120. In a letter to Anna July 8, 1879, she adds this certain conviction: “There is no gulf stream of orthodoxy, so called, that has a current strong enough to arrest the onward course of the soul that has once been set afloat on God’s love.” Smith Collection, B. L. Fisher Library, Wilmore, KY.

  8. 8.

    John L. Nickalls, ed., The Journal of George Fox (London: Religious Society of Friends, 1975), 19.

  9. 9.

    Letter to her sister, Carrie, Oct. 16, 1979, Smith Collection, B. L. Fisher library, Wilmore, KY. All italicized words in quotations are her emphasis.

  10. 10.

    Letter to Anna, May 24, 1878. B. L. Fisher Library.

  11. 11.

    Letter to Prisca, Dec. 12, 1879. B. L. Fisher Library.

  12. 12.

    Ray Strachey, ed. Religious Fanaticism (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), 11. Republished as Group Movements of the Past and experiments in Guidance, Faber & Faber, 1934.

  13. 13.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 11.

  14. 14.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 203.

  15. 15.

    Logan Pearsall Smith, Philadelphia Quaker: The Letters of Hannah Whitall Smith (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1950), 141.

  16. 16.

    Thomas C. Upham, Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon (New York: Harper & Bros., 1877, 1st ed. 1847). Upham’s version of Guyon connected her mysticism of divine union to the Holiness Movement he led. He likened the Holiness Movement to a contemporary expression of Guyon’s spirituality.

  17. 17.

    For an introduction to Guyon see Dianne Guenin-Lelle and Ronney Mourad, Jeanne Guyon: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012). The first English translations of her writings were done by Quakers, and thereafter she became a guide to spirituality among many Protestant movements in England, Germany and the United States, especially Pietists and Methodists, and strongest among Quakers, see p. 45. François Fénelon (1651–1715), like Guyon , taught contemplative prayer and Christian perfection, and supported the work of Guyon. The works of both were condemned by the Catholic church as part of the “Quietism heresy.”

  18. 18.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 234.

  19. 19.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 234.

  20. 20.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 172.

  21. 21.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 172–3.

  22. 22.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 182.

  23. 23.

    Letter to Anna, Jan. 5, 1864, Smith Collection, B. L. Fisher Library (all emphasis in quotations are hers).

  24. 24.

    This section (ch. 21–3), which comprises an essential and critical epoch of her spiritual journey, is edited out of all subsequent editions of her autobiography (Smith, Unselfishness of God, 199–219).

  25. 25.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 199–203.

  26. 26.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 204–5.

  27. 27.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 206.

  28. 28.

    See Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A. and James Walsh, S. J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).

  29. 29.

    See, for example, Smith, Unselfishness of God, 215.

  30. 30.

    Diary, June 10, 1869, Smith Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, IN.

  31. 31.

    Diary, June 10, 1869.

  32. 32.

    Diary, Feb. 25, 1871, Smith Papers, Lilly Library.

  33. 33.

    Diary, Mar. 12, 1967, Smith papers, Lilly Library.

  34. 34.

    In a letter to her parents from Millville Nov. 1, 1867, she writes: “reading Isaac Pennington with the greatest delight—it is almost equal to Madame Guyon.” Smith Collection, B. L. Fisher library. Penington (1616–79) was a defender of the early Quaker movement, and generally considered the movement’s most mystical early interpreter. His writings are valued as guides to inward spiritual experience.

  35. 35.

    Isaac Penington, A Brief Account concerning the People called Quakers in Works of Isaac Penington, Vol. 3 (Farmington, ME: Quaker Heritage Press, 1997), 355.

  36. 36.

    Hannah’s quote by Penington above was borrowed by the early Higher Life Convention to describe its aim, and captured the atmosphere of the early movement. See J. B. Figgis, Keswick from Within (London: Marshall Brothers, 1914), 18.

  37. 37.

    Letter to Sister, Nov. 13, 1972, Smith Collection, B. L. Fisher Library.

  38. 38.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 166.

  39. 39.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 166.

  40. 40.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 168.

  41. 41.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 169.

  42. 42.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 169.

  43. 43.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 170.

  44. 44.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 170.

  45. 45.

    Strachey, Religious Fanaticism, 171.

  46. 46.

    James Gregory, Reformers, Patrons and Philanthropists: The Cowper-Temples and High Politics in Victorian England (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 217.

  47. 47.

    See Smith’s posthumously published Religious Fanaticism for an account of Harris and Oliphant’s sexual theology. For Oliphant’s mysticism see Laurence Oliphant, Sympneumata, or, Evolutionary Forces Now Active in Man (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1885). For a recent scholarly analysis see Julie Chajes, “Alice and Laurence Oliphant’s Divine Androgyne and ‘The Woman Question,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 84, Issue 2, 1 (June 2016): 498–529. Chajes concludes that the Oliphants’ books were “the strange outcome of the convergence of Thomas Lake Harris’s interpretations of Swedenborgian conjugal love and Spiritualistic doctrines of affinity, with the Oliphants’ middle-class values and Evangelical influences,” 529.

  48. 48.

    Gregory, Reformers, Patrons and Philanthropists, 217.

  49. 49.

    Gregory, Reformers, Patrons and Philanthropists, 127.

  50. 50.

    Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (Glenside, PA: Quaker Heritage Press, 2002), 175.

  51. 51.

    Barclay, Apology, 205.

  52. 52.

    Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1885), iv. [1875 edition, Toronto, S. R. Briggs], iv.

  53. 53.

    Smith, Every-Day Religion, 160.

  54. 54.

    Letter to Prisca, Dec. 14, 1897, Smith Papers, B. L. Fisher Library.

  55. 55.

    Logan Pearsall Smith, Philadelphia Quaker, 34.

  56. 56.

    Smith, Diary, March 1878, Smith Papers, Lilly Library.

  57. 57.

    Hannah Whitall Smith, Bible Readings on the Progressive Development of Truth and Experience in the Books of the Old Testament (Boston: Willard Tract Depository, 1878).

  58. 58.

    Smith, Bible Readings, iv.

  59. 59.

    Smith, Bible Readings, iv.

  60. 60.

    Smith, Bible Readings, 14, 16.

  61. 61.

    She quotes both Origen and Bernard of Clairvaux in her section on Song of Songs, both known for their mystical interpretation of this text. Smith, Bible Readings, 350–351.

  62. 62.

    Smith, Bible Readings, 365.

  63. 63.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 304.

  64. 64.

    Smith, Unselfishness of God, 311.

  65. 65.

    Ronney Mourad and Dianne Guenin-Lelle, The Prison Narratives of Jeanne Guyon (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 135.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Portland Seminary of George Fox University, Portland, OR, USA

    Carole Dale Spencer

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Correspondence to Carole Dale Spencer .

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  1. Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, USA

    Jon R. Kershner

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Spencer, C.D. (2019). Hannah Whitall Smith’s Highway of Holiness. In: Kershner, J. (eds) Quakers and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21653-5_8

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