Two nights before this lecture, Neville turned on the television for the news and caught comedian George Burns reminiscing about his old friends Billy Rose and Sophie Tucker. Burns recounted how Rose had risen from the slums of New York -- short in stature, poor, and self-taught in shorthand -- to become an expert stenographer for financier Bernard Baruch and eventually a major showman who staged the Aquacade at the World's Fair, ultimately leaving an estate of twenty-five million dollars. Neville uses the story to make the point that even such worldly success is nothing without the deeper 'Promise' of union with God.