The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life Is Now Available

William Thomas Irvin · http://www.VBCoden.com

Kristin has walked ladies through Hannah Whitall Smith’s The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life chapter by chapter, and she has placed it in the hands of many new converts over the years. She has a special love for this book and wanted to make it available to anyone who desires the secret, so we prepared an edition of our own, set from the Fleming H. Revell printing of 1888. The paperback and the Kindle edition are on Amazon today, and the hardcover is being processed for publication, and will be available any day now.

The Book

Mrs. Smith first published this book in 1875, and she wrote it for the believer who knows what God has promised him in Christ but does not have the rest he reads about in his Bible. Her first chapter says that all of God’s children “feel instinctively, in their moments of divine illumination, that a life of inward rest and outward victory is their inalienable birthright.” The rest of the book shows how a believer enters that life and what keeps him out of it.

Her chapter on faith shows how she works. A Christian tells her that he has no faith and does not know how to get it. She asks him to imagine waking up to-morrow and refusing to trust anyone on those same grounds. He could not eat his breakfast, because he could not believe “the cook has not put poison in the coffee, or that the butcher has not sent home diseased or unhealthy meat.” He could not ride the train, because he could not trust “the engineer, nor the conductor, nor the builders of the carriages, nor the managers of the road.” No one lives that way. He trusts all of these men every day without a second thought, so when he says that he has no faith, God is the only One he has refused to trust. She tells him to say so in plain words: “I have no faith in—God! I cannot believe—God!”

She deals with consecration, the will, guidance, doubts, temptation, and failure in the same way, and she closes with what this life produces in a believer, in chapters on growth, service, obedience, and union with Christ.

Our Edition

We kept her words. Her spelling, her punctuation, and her wording stand as the 1888 printing has them, and we modernized nothing. Our additions are my Foreword, Kristin’s Introduction, a portrait of Mrs. Smith, and, at the opening of each of the three parts, a verse from the Authorized Version and lines from a hymn. We left out the six pages of the publisher’s advertisements that followed her last chapter.

We do not agree with Mrs. Smith on everything. She was raised a Quaker and later embraced universal restitution, and her preface says that her truths “will fit in with every creed.” That is not so, and the Foreword answers this concept from the Bible. We published this book because of what it teaches about surrender and trust in Christ, and we ask you to read it the way you should read any book: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Read the Foreword

You are welcome to read my Foreword here before you decide on the book. In it I explain how a saved man goes back to a yoke of bondage, why obedience must come out of love for Christ, and where Mrs. Smith must be read with care. Every book we have in print is at VBCoden.com/books.

A Word from Kristin’s Husband

A KEEN observer once said to Hannah Whitall Smith, “You Christians seem to have a religion that makes you miserable. You are like a man with a headache. He does not want to get rid of his head, but it hurts him to keep it.” She put those words in the first paragraph of her first chapter, and then set out to furnish the eternal contrast: The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.

As far as the headache goes, I have known Christians like that. I have pastored them. Some weeks, I have been one myself. Mrs. Smith grants the charge, as we must, and then answers it with twenty chapters of joyful rebuttal. The Lord Jesus Christ never meant for His bride to live that way. This is not the modern cult of happiness; it is the fruit of the Spirit.

Her method is surrender and trust, told, as she says in her own Preface, “in the homely and familiar words of every-day life.” She writes from depth of experience, as a lady who had to learn these realities for herself. By the time the reader, perhaps one who suffers with such a headache, reaches the chapters on failure and on the chariots of God, there is a serene realization that she is not simply explaining doctrine; she is describing a heart at rest with God.

The Servants of Righteousness

A complex turn comes in the Christian life, so subtle that a man may not see when he is making it. A sinner hears the gospel from a preacher with beautiful feet, and he learns that salvation is in Christ alone. Paul explains the work of the law among those who were under it: “But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith“ (Galatians 3:23-24).

The law can identify the fault, but it cannot correct it, and worse, it cannot justify the sinner. What the law says, “it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God“ (Romans 3:19), for “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight“ (Romans 3:20). Recognizing his desperate situation in the light of a wonderful Saviour, the sinner trusts the Lord Jesus Christ. He is saved by grace through faith, apart from the deeds of the law.

What glorious news! But this is only the entryway into that complex turn.

Having been saved by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, this new creature may go in search of the very yoke from which Christ has made him free. He subjects himself anew to rules his flesh imagines it can keep. Being dead to the law, that he might live unto God, has not yet become a fundamental reality to him (Galatians 2:19).

Paul watched this happen to an entire province. “Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?“ (Galatians 3:3). Two chapters later, he gives the remedy: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage“ (Galatians 5:1).

What makes this so complex is that this man desires a good thing. He wants to obey God. He has been “made free from sin,” and he wants to live as one of “the servants of righteousness“ (Romans 6:18). But he struggles to know what that means on Monday morning. The desire is good and right; legal bondage performed by the will of the flesh is the wrong means to the right end.

Paul spent chapters three and four pulling the law out from under the Galatians, and the foundation he put in its place was “faith which worketh by love“ (Galatians 5:6). Not faith and then legislation, but faith that goes to work, with love energizing that work.

The Lord said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments“ (John 14:15). Somehow we reverse the order: keep my commandments, and you will come to love me. No. Love for the Lord comes first, and the keeping of His commandments comes out of love for Christ.

To illustrate this point, the Apostle gives us a picture, and it begins with a truth any reasonable man would be willing to grant: “the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth“ (Romans 7:1). The law governs the man while he is still alive. Paul then pictures a wife, bound to her husband while he lives, but loosed from that bond should he die. Death sets her at liberty to marry another without the charge of adultery (Romans 7:2-3). This brings us to the essence of the illustration: “Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God“ (Romans 7:4).

The purpose of this new marriage is that we bring forth fruit unto God. The fruit is not the price of the marriage; it is what the marriage produces. Two verses later, the Apostle says that we should serve “in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter“ (Romans 7:6).

I am blessed with a wonderful wife, whom I love dearly. She is the motivation for this project. But I do not have a list on my refrigerator of things I must do to keep my wife happy. I desire to do that which makes her happy. That want comes from my love for her, and the doing comes from the same.

Replace the love, and therefore the want, with a list, and the result is a miserable home. A man in that home will keep the list for a short while, and then he will fail, because there is no lasting motive in it, only rigid adherence to the list on the door. For the Christian, the more he loves the Lord, the more he will want to live godly in Christ Jesus. Obedience is the fruit of this bond with Christ, and it cannot be forced by a yoke a man puts on himself.

This error does not always look careless. Sometimes it looks severe and learned. One route to that discouraging end runs through legalistic demands for external conformity. The weak brother imposes unnecessary restrictions upon himself and then judges the brother who does not follow him: “let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth“ (Romans 14:3).

The other route is harder to spot. A man learns diligently, and much of what he learns is true, but little of it moves from his head to his heart. “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth“ (1 Corinthians 8:1). He does not have a full heart; he has a full mouth, and he can use godly ideas to cause great harm.

Both men need the same cure: to know and love the Saviour who shed His blood for them and promised, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee“ (Hebrews 13:5). How does a man come to love the Lord more? Not by another statute added to his self-imposed structure, nor by the memorization of another doctrinal fact. “We love him, because he first loved us“ (1 John 4:19). The love he needs grows through fellowship with the Saviour who first loved him.

Nothing here excuses the Christian from a godly life in Christ Jesus or from learning doctrine at the deepest levels. This is the proper pathway to those ends. Mrs. Smith deals with the heart first, and obedience follows: “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith“ (Colossians 2:6-7).

Kristin’s Book

This edition of this treasured book is my wife’s. We made careful use of the 1888 printing; I wrote this Foreword, Kristin wrote the Introduction that follows, and we left the rest to Hannah Whitall Smith. Kristin has a special love for this book and wanted to make it available for all who desire the secret. We hope this edition is as beautiful as the Revell copy she found.

Furthermore, twelve years ago today (September 1, 2014), my wife and I were married. As the greater beneficiary of this arrangement, I deeply desired to help her see this book through to publication. Of every gift God has given me, she is the greatest under the sun: “Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest“ (Ecclesiastes 9:9).

If this book is in your hand, it is likely she put it there. We do not publish books to earn money; we do so to make the sense of God’s word available to the interested soul. Kristin has faithfully walked ladies through this book, chapter by chapter, and in the end what they gain is the Person. The secret carefully detailed in this book is rest for the weary soul in Christ. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.

What Was Kept

Hannah Whitall Smith’s text is intact just as she left it in the 1888 printing. Nothing was modernized, as is the unfortunate method today; her words and her spelling are just as she wrote them.

The text is the Fleming H. Revell printing, her own new and revised issue. If a word has slipped anywhere in these pages, it is my mistake and not a deliberate decision, and we would be glad to learn of it. Nothing was meant to be altered.

Her emphasis italics, lost during the resetting, were restored to the thirty-two words she had marked; they carry her meaning and are not a printer’s decoration. One thing is left out: the six pages of the publisher’s advertisements that follow her last chapter.

Where We Differ

Leaving the book unchanged sometimes requires the very charity commended in this Foreword and throughout the book. Hannah Whitall Smith was raised a Quaker and later embraced universal restitution. Some statements in this book must therefore be read carefully in light of that later belief. The concern is mild here, but it is real.

Mrs. Smith says in her Preface that her truths “will fit in with every creed,” and that behind all religions there is “an absolute religion, that holds the vital truth of each.” This is not so. A religion may bear the appearance of light and still deny the only Saviour, for “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light“ (2 Corinthians 11:14). But “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved“ (Acts 4:12).

Mrs. Smith informs the reader that her book is not theological, but practical. In that context, this book has great value, but practical teaching is not above proof. Therefore, read her the way you read all books and hear all preaching: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good“ (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Read this book thoroughly, then put it into the hands of another who needs to learn to love Christ.

William Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church
Coden, Alabama, the first of September, 2026

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com