Feelings Unnecessary for Doing the Will of God

Hannah Whitall Smith's biographer, Marie Henry, reveals how the extremely helpful The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life came to be written--and it is intriguing:

"In 1873, Robert [Pearsall Smith, Hannah's husband] had started a little paper called The Christian's Pathway to Power. When he became involved with his preaching ministry, he had trouble producing material for the paper and so prevailed upon Hannah to write an article for it. She reluctantly agreed to write one article if Robert would stop his daily drink of wine that his doctor had prescribed. As she put it, 'The article was dragged from me at the point of the bayonet.'

"Robert was somewhat nettled to discover that his wife's first article excited more interest than anything else in the paper. There was nothing for him to do but put pressure on her to write another and another and another. She claimed she did not feel any sense of being called to write them, beyond the fact that she wanted to oblige Robert. In fact, she described herself as feeling most uninspired. A publisher asked Hannah to put the articles in book form, and she had promised to finish the last chapter before she arrived in England.

"The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, published in 1875, has sold millions of copies and is hailed as a religious classic. The phenomenal success of this particular book, out of all her writings, led Hannah to say that 'to do things from a sense of duty is as likely a road to success as to have a feeling of inspiration.' She often used her seasickness as the text for a plain and pointed moral lesson: Feelings were unreliable; faithfulness was the important thing. Whether she felt inspired or uninspired was beside the point. It was God who did the work."

On another occasion Mrs. Smith answered a letter from her friend Priscilla Mounsey in the following way:

"But now the question is how to bring oneself to be satisfied in God when there is no feeling. And I do not know what else to say, but that it must be by faith. . . . I confess that it does seem an odd sort of thing to do, to become satisfied by saying one is satisfied when one is not. But is it not just what faith is described to be, 'calling those things which be not as though they were'? What else can we do?

"In my own case, I just determined I would be satisfied with God alone. I gave up seeking after any feeling of satisfaction. I said, 'Lord, thou art enough for me, just thyself, without any of thy gifts or thy blessings. I have thee and I am content. I will be content. I choose to be content. I am content.' I said this by faith. I still have to say it by faith often. I have to do so this very evening, for I am not very well and feel what I expect thou would call 'low.' But it makes no difference how I feel. He is just the same, and He is with me, and I am His, and I am satisfied. . . ."