On the morning of this lecture, as was his custom, Neville had his radio tuned to KFAC's classical music while he read his Bible. The one interruption that morning was an advertisement for the Herald-Examiner, boasting that it was the one paper in the city dealing only in plain, unembellished facts. He turns this into his opening illustration: a world drowning in mere facts is itself 'the flood', and only imagination, not fact, truly gives anything life.