Nowadays, it is smart to be spiritually alive. It is old-fogyism to be ignorant of that happiness-producing transformation which people everywhere are enjoying at this time.
Above the spray of white gladioli appeared the plump, beaming face of the pastor, the smile serving as a minor sun to the shining flowers. For a moment he stood silently, "just loving the audience," as he once put it. Then the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale began to preach. He had preached the same theme many times before, not only from the pulpit but at countless business-club lunches, on TV, in newspaper columns, magazine pieces, and in a book (The Power of Positive Thinking) which has been at the top of the bestseller lists for almost two years. The Rev. Dr. Peale and his overflow audience of 2,400 were celebrating the 100th anniversary of Manhattan's famed Marble Collegiate Church, whose pastor he has been for 22 years. No old fogy, and spiritually as alive as they come, Pastor Peale was at his happiness-producing best.
Everyone, said Dr. Peale, can live a magnificent, effective life—if only "he is right with God . . . You have to get in tune with God and tell yourself at the start of each day, 'Another great day has begun'. . . You can be what you have pictured, and accomplish what you want your life to be . . . The formula for good days ahead is to pray hard, work hard, believe hard—and picture hard."
7.5 Billion Headaches. The tireless preaching of this message has won Dr. Peale one of the largest followings of any American preacher. He reaches an estimated 30 million people a week. His TV program, What's Your Trouble?, is heard over nearly as many stations (130) as Bishop Fulton Sheen's. His radio program, The Art of Living, with its 125 stations, does better than John Cameron Swayze's. His celebrity-studded monthly magazine, Guidepost, has a circulation of 656,000, or more than The New Yorker. And his nationally syndicated column, Confident Living, runs in more papers (146) than Leonard Lyons'. A statistical-minded friend of Dr. Peale's once calculated that the U.S. suffers from 7.5 billion headaches a year, and the pastor's great message is that religion can cure almost all of them. He sees in Christianity not so much redemption by suffering as an easy way to "rise above sorrow."
Says Pastor Peale: "God and the doctor, that's what I give them. Anxiety is the great American disease. Take businessmen. They are a wonderful group of people, but they are so high-strung and tense. I watched a friend being carried out after a heart attack, and he said, 'Use me as a warning.' People have lost the secret of inner peace."
Coué in 3-D. The Power of Positive Thinking (Prentice-Hall; $2.95) is Dr. Peale's guide back to inner peace. So far, it has sold about 800,000 copies, has been abridged for teenagers, recorded in an RCA album, and put on film. It takes Dr. Coué's famous autosuggestive jingle ("Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better") and puts it in 3-D. The added dimensions: religion and psychology. The book is filled with "psycho-spiritual" advice that makes personal salvation a kind of do-it-yourself project. Samples: