Wallace D. Wattles from a first edition of The Science of Getting Rich, 1910.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth

How a Quaker socialist revolutionized the prosperity gospel

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

— Paradise Lost

It began as the bleakest of Christmases at the Wattles home. In the Indiana winter of 1896, the family patriarch, Wallace, a rake-thin…