During a visit to Barbados about two years before this lecture, a man challenged Neville, asking how his mystical experience of grace could have happened to him -- 'You are a Goddard,' from a prominent, thoroughly business-minded family with no ministers, artists, or intellectuals in its background. Neville answered that God's grace cannot be earned by piety or pedigree; it is an unmerited gift, and Jesus himself kept company not with the pious and prominent but with tax collectors, harlots, and sinners.