ABSTRACT
Particularly after the Second World War, Norman Vincent Peale (b. 1898) successfully blurred even further for a vast readership the already hazy distinction in New Thought between spiritual and worldly comfort. Peale began as Methodist but, by the time he took over the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1932, denominational limits were unimportant to him. He retailed the ingredients of successful living in a series of best selling therapeutic manuals and also collaborated with the psychiatrist, Smiley Blanton (1882-1966), in a clinic affiliated to his church in promoting mental equilibrium as the basis of success.
