Hannah Whitall Smith

Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911) was a Quaker lay preacher and devotional writer from Philadelphia who became a leading voice in the Holiness movement in the United States and the Higher Life movement in Britain. Her book The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life (1875) became one of the most widely read devotional works of its era, and she was also active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the women's suffrage movement. Though never a Universalist by denomination, she embraced the doctrine of the final restoration of all souls, an experience she recounted in her spiritual autobiography The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It (1903). She spent her later years in England, where she died in 1911.

The spiritual autobiography of the Quaker author of The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life — one of the era's most beloved devotional writers — culminating in her 'third epoch': the discovery of the unselfishness of God and the restitution of all things. Her matter-of-fact account of embracing universal salvation scandalized her evangelical publishers (later editions quietly dropped those chapters), which makes this early printing the one to have.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)