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’s career but for his broadest, if least known, achievement. The driving principle behind all the self-help movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries appeared in the title of Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking. Raised in the Midwest, Peale was placed in charge of an ailing and shrinking congregation on Manhattan’s East Side during the Great Depression. Within twenty years, however, the Protestant minister reached into every corner of America—and many corners of the world—with his manifesto proclaiming the transformative power of positive imagery and self-affirmation. His philosophy was core New Thought, though couched in terms to which the churchgoing public could easily relate. Peale eschewed references to “magic laws” or “secrets of the ages,” instead emphasizing traditional prayer, Bible reading, and a healthy self-image. Nevertheless, careful readers might have wondered at the Mesmeric tone of the minister’s ideas about “the emanation of prayer power,” specifically that “the human brain can send off power by thoughts and prayers. The human body’s magnetic power has actually been tested.”

In his thousands of articles, lectures, books, and homilies, Peale shared innumerable stories from his life, but he revealed relatively little about his influences or how he related to the spiritual and intellectual trends around him. He went further, however, in a remarkable and overlooked interview given in 1987, six years before his death, to the magazine Ernest Holmes had started, Science of Mind. In it, the best-selling minister recounted the direct influence he found in his older contemporary. Peale recalled that when he worked as a cub reporter at a Detroit daily newspaper in the early 1920s, a tough-talking editor spotted his “paralyzing fear of inadequacy.” As the minister recounted, “He took me aside and handed me a book, Creative Mind and Success, by Ernest Holmes.” It was Holmes’s second book, written in 1919.

“Now I want you to read this,” the editor told him. “I know this fellow Holmes. I’ve learned a lot from him, and so can you.” And what did Peale learn? “Love God, love others, you can if you think you can, the proper control and use of the human mind, drop your limited sense of self and gain true Self-Reliance.” Holmes’s slender volume of essays and affirmations changed everything for Peale, who entered Boston University’s School of Theology soon after finding it. “There is no question in my mind that Ernest Holmes’s teachings had helped me on my way,” he said.

Three decades later, the ideas that Peale had discovered in that short book—clearly broadened by his own life experiences—formed the basis for the most influential self-help philosophy of the twentieth century. While Peale was gracious in tone and lavish in praise when asked about Holmes in 1987, the minister otherwise appeared to go little out of his way to credit the California mystic. Biographies of Peale, including his personal memoirs, make no mention of Ernest Holmes. Ten years after Peale’s death, a staff member conducting a tour of the minister’s headquarters in upstate New York had never heard the name.

* The Journal is not to be confused with The Christian Science Monitor, which Eddy started in 1908 in response to the “yellow journalism” of the day and, in particular, its attacks on her. The Monitor remains one of Eddy’s finest legacies as a sober and independent source of news.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MAIL-ORDER PROPHET

What is whispered in your ear, shout from the rooftops.

—MATTHEW 10:27

A vast range of figures professed their own versions of the New Thought gospel, and many succeeded in attracting readers and audiences. But a man called Frank B. Robinson holds a special place. From the onset of the Great Depression to the years immediately following World War II, this solidly built Idaho druggist used ads in newspapers, in magazines, and on the radio to craft nothing less than his own mail-order religious faith.

He named it Psychiana, and its ideas were bedrock New Thought, packaged and