Ten years ago in Moscow, Idaho, a tall, husky, smooth-talking drug clerk named Frank Bruce Robinson borrowed $500 from a friend, spent $400 of it to buy some advertising space in a psychology magazine. Reared in the Baptist Church, Frank Robinson had recanted his Christian beliefs, had acquired certain ideas on religious psychology which he wished to teach. His advertisement brought 2.852 replies, one from a British cotton importer of Alexandria, Egypt named Geoffrey Peel
Birley, who sent Robinson his photograph. That night Drug Clerk Robinson dreamed he saw Birley making mystic motions over a corpse, thought he heard him saying: "This is Psychiana, the power that will bring new life to a spiritually dead world." Next day the drug clerk wrote the cotton broker: "You are to be associated with me in this business. Please send $40,000." Fortnight later, a bank in Spokane, Wash. informed Robinson that $20,000 had been deposited to his account, that Mr. Birley promised $20,000 more the following week.
As Frank Robinson, now 52, is frank to admit, such a story "makes me sound nuts." Nevertheless he tells it to explain the founding of Psychiana, a non-Christian (but godly), mail-order religion which has enrolled between 500,000 and 600,000 people in 67 countries, and which is probably the only faith in the world which guarantees "money back if you are not satisfied." As a mail-order gospel, propagated by advertising (in 400 newspapers, 50 magazines), Psychiana passed a milestone last week when Founder Robinson motored from Moscow to Portland, Ore., placed an order for 5,000,000 envelopes— a year's supply—and announced a new policy which will make Psychiana more like a church. Half a million letters will shortly go out to Psychiana students throughout the world informing them how-to organize study groups (resembling religious congregations) in their cities.
Where Frank Bruce Robinson was born he does not know. He used to think it was New York, where he was brought up, and whence he ran away at 14, when his British father married a second wife. Next he became a licensed pharmacist in Belleville. Ont., beat the bass drum in the local Salvation Army. The president of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., helped him through that institution and its Bible Training School. Ordained a Baptist minister in Toronto, Robinson received a D.D. and doctorate in psychology from the College of Divine Metaphysics in Indianapolis. Beyond teaching Sunday school and helping at evangelistic meetings while earning his living as a druggist, "Doc" Robinson (as his friends now call him) never preached, soon came to disbelieve Christian doctrine. Said he: "My parents pumped hellfire and damnation into me until I was sick. I just vomited it up." He declares today that Heaven can be reached "here and now," that Psychiana is "God in operation." That this God-force can be utilized by people living moral lives is Doc Robinson's chief current thesis, and he has 10,000 letters in his files from people who believe they have drawn upon Psychiana's "mighty. never-failing power" to cure everything from lovesickness to bleeding piles.