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Here we are setting the living example! Last month I said we
might call it "OPERATION HAPPINESS." These campuses are like oases
of bubbling-over happiness in the desert wilderness of gloom,
ugliness, discouragement, frustration, hopelessness and despair.
BUT, I have learned through more than forty years' experience
that in general only a small truth-loving minority -- and the
religiously interested -- will listen or read, when the message is
given in religious-sounding or Biblical language! For the past
fifty or sixty years, the anti-God, anti-Bible concept of evolution
has permeated all education, from first grade through the
universities. Belief in God has all but disappeared from the minds
of those who teach our young and our collegians. A deep-seated
PREJUDICE has been implanted in most minds against anything
emanating from the Bible, or anything associated with Christ or
with God.
So, to be able to get THE TRUTH over to the 95% we could never
reach using Biblical language, The PLAIN TRUTH now gives out THIS
SAME TRUTH in the world's own language. It avoids all appearance
of being religious or Biblical. Even so, there is much Biblical
teaching that is too spiritually deep for unconverted minds to
comprehend. So the necessity arose for a NEW magazine, TOMORROW'S
WORLD, for those who do hunger and thirst for these deeper truths.
So, as stated above, beginning July, 1968, we launched a
worldwide circulation-expansion drive for The PLAIN TRUTH, and
began publication of TOMORROW'S WORLD.
In the United States we purchased full-page advertising space
in LIFE magazine several issues, one in LOOK, and we purchased
advertising space in many issues of TV GUIDE (largest mass
circulation in the United States). Our ads offered trial
subscriptions to The PLAIN TRUTH. Also we purchased regular two-
page space for the same ads in Reader's Digest in many of their
foreign editions around the world -- in several languages --
English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. In addition we used
full pages in the London Sunday Times and other media in England,
besides the largest-circulated magazine in Germany, and other
countries.
The response was OVERWHELMING -- far in excess of
expectations. At the end of the three months' trial subscription,
these subscribers were offered a year's already-paid subscription.
An astonishingly high percentage renewed for the full year's
subscription.
The PLAIN TRUTH is printed on our own huge web-fed magazine
presses, full color, at Pasadena, at North Sydney, Australia, and
at Radlett, England. But all this overwhelming response did TWO
THINGS:
1) It shot The PLAIN TRUTH circulation from a little over a
million to more than TWO MILLION COPIES. That was FINE -- GREAT
-- GOOD. BUT --