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Little negatives like "I'm afraid" and "I doubt" are the termites in the house of "right thinking" that Peale has built. "Doubt closes the power flow . . . Get interested in something. Get absolutely enthralled . . . Get out of yourself. Be somebody. Do something. Don't sit around moaning about things, reading the papers and saying 'Why don't they do something?' ... If you're not getting into good causes, no wonder you're tired. You're disintegrating. You're deteriorating. You're dying on the vine."
How to Grow Christmas Spirit. Norman Vincent Peale himself is flourishing in the vineyard. Born the son of a Methodist pastor in the untroubled turn-of-the-century town of Bowersville, Ohio, Peale studied at Boston University's School of Theology, held pastorates in Brooklyn and Syracuse, N.Y. before coming to the Marble Collegiate Church in 1932. There Dr. Peale faced empty balconies and a congregation of about 200. Now membership is some 4,000, and attached to the church is a clinic with seven staff psychiatrists.
Dr. Peale is a small, round whirlwind of a man. In a typical recent week, he raced from speech dates in Racine, Wis. (manufacturers' association) to Columbus (Property Insurance Agents of Ohio) to Pittsburgh (mass meeting "for crippled children or some such") to Cincinnati (H. S. Pough department store "to give the employees a little chat on how to fill Pough's with Christmas spirit") to Louisville (National Sales Executive Club).
A devoted family man, Dr. Peale manages to spend about three days a week with his wife and youngest child, Elizabeth, 12 (son John, 18, and daughter Margaret, 20, are both away at college), finds time to watch Roy Rogers, one of his favorite TV shows, and help his younger daughter with her homework. He works late into the evening on his newspaper column and his regular page in Look Magazine, "Norman Vincent Peale Answers Your Questions," which is often concerned with the kind of family problems that are close to his heart. (To a mother troubled because her teen-age son keeps pin-up girls on the wall, Dr. Peale recently wrote: "Ask the sports celebrities to autograph photographs for him. He will shift to a manly interest and away from the so-called glamour cuties. Give him a beautiful picture of his mother for his wall.")
Visit from Mother. If he ever slowed down, says Dr. Peale, he would simply "pass out." Not that this holds any terror for him, for he is convinced that "there is no death." He is particularly sure because, after his mother died 15 years ago, she appeared to him one day: "It was like music, like a song without words, and she was saying, 'Everything is all right, Norman. I am happy. This is a wonderful place . . . This is better than anything you have ever dreamed.' "