Hannah whitall smith autobiography sample

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When she could not work up a feeling of love for God or a desire to do his will, she despaired of salvation. It seems to me a mother, who can be selfish and think of her own comfort and her own welfare before that of her children, is an abnormal mother, who fails in the very highest duty of motherhood. The awful sense of the responsibility that rested upon him, because of the things done by the creature he had created, opened my eyes to see the responsibility God must necessarily feel, if the creatures He had created were to turn out badly.

All doubts are an attack of the enemy; the Holy spirit never suggests them--never.

As an escape from the doctrine of eternal torment, I at first embraced the doctrine of annihilation for the wicked, and for a little while tried to comfort myself with the belief that this life ended all for them. I knew that, poor and imperfect as my love must be, I could never have enjoyed myself in Heaven while one of my children, no matter how naughty, was shut out; and that He could and did enjoy Himself, while countless thousands of His children were shut out, seemed to me a failure in the most essential element of love.

Could our God do less? The lost gold piece is still gold, with the image of the King upon it; the lost sheep is a sheep still, not a wolf; the lost son has still the blood of his father in his veins. And as it always came afresh at the sight of a strange face, I found myself obliged to wear a thick veil whenever I went into the streets, in order that I might spare myself the awful realization.

Up to then, while I had rejoiced in the salvation for myself that I had discovered, I had been secretly beset from time to time with a torturing feeling that, after all, it was rather a selfish salvation, both for Him and for me. When she had finished enumerating all the magnificent qualities of her man, I said to her, "But, darling, suppose he should turn out badly; suppose he should do mischief and hurt people, and make things go wrong, what would thee do then?" "Oh," she said, "I would not have any trouble; I'd just make him lie down and chop his head off."

I saw at once what a splendid illustration this was of the responsibility of a Creator, and it brought to my mind Mrs.

Shelley's weird story of the artist Frankenstein, who made the monstrous image of a man; which, when it was finished, suddenly to his horror, became alive and went out into the world working havoc wherever it went. She will starve that they may have food. But I see now that I might have vindicated that honor in an equally effectual but more Christlike way.

The "all" in one case could not in fairness mean less than the "all" in the other. In fact I believe that all the problems of the spiritual life, which are often so distressing to conscientious souls, would vanish like mist before the rising sun, if the full blaze of the mother-heart of God should be turned upon them.

I have no doubt his object was to combat my views on Restitution, although we were not talking on that subject; but he evidently wanted to convince me that God was not quite so foolishly loving as I thought.

Another skin seemed to have been peeled off every text, and my Bible fairly shone with a new meaning. Hannah wondered what prompted so many to give up their lunch hour and went to see. For Hannah Whitall Smith, the loss of a five-year-old daughter finally unlocked the gates of heaven. But the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to me that it would be a confession of serious failure on the part of the Creator, if He could find no way out of the problem of His creation, but to annihilate the creatures whom He had created.

There have always been, I believe, differences of opinion among them in regard to this view; but those with whom I was thrown held very rigidly the belief that some people were "elected" to salvation, and some were elected to "reprobation," and that nothing the individual could do could change these eternal decrees.