No sir! There is no outside force but that which we give to the seeming outside force. [...]. Well, I’ll say this much about this power called Imagination: it will do nothing for us until we have assumed the feeling of the wish fulfilled. You can’t compel it. It refuses to act under compulsion. I can’t compel myself to believe anything. It will only act by persuasion…what would the feeling be like if it were true? I’m trying to persuade myself into that feeling. But to say I will feel it, it will simply bound back. So you cannot compel it, you can’t command it. It will only act by persuasion: what would it be like? How would I see the world? What would it be like? What would I feel like if it were true? And so only by persuasion would it respond. So try to persuade yourself. It’ll work that way, work like a charm. If you really believe your Imagination is Jesus Christ, if you really believe that that is God the Lord, and no other God, no other Lord, then what are you imagining? All things are possible to God; therefore, all things are possible to Imagination. You can’t deny that you can imagine anything that one tells you if you understand what he is talking about. You may not believe that what he has said though you can imagine it is possible. That’s your limitation, because you can imagine it. Tell me anything in this world, if I can understand the tongue in which you speak, if you speak in my tongue, the English tongue, I can follow you. You can take me into all the styles of the world…don’t take me into mathematics where I can’t follow you…but take me into any vivid description, word description, I’ll follow you. I may not believe you, but it doesn’t matter. If I don’t believe you that’s my limitation, that is not yours. If I can believe anything, I can fulfill it. It was said of I think it was Thomas Arnold who was headmaster of Rugby School in England, and the boys used to say, “It’s a shame to tell him a lie, because he believes it.” So the boys didn’t tell him any lies, because he believed one. That was Thomas Arnold. He was so given to his boys and so loved them that he trusted them and they all agreed that it’s a shame to tell him a lie because he believed one. I’ll tell you there is no lie…all things are possible to God. What today you and I take for granted like going around the moon, tomorrow we’ll land on the moon. And turning on lights…do you know, when I was born we had none of these things in Barbados. We had a little carriage drawn by a horse, no thought of an automobile, an airplane, a missile. Yet all of these things are in our world. They were not always in our world until someone actually believed them. First they conceived them and then believed them. You can’t conceive of anything that isn’t true in God’s world, because all things are possible to God. But here we’re living in the world of Caesar…so make it a practical world until he who began the good work in you brings it to completion, which is to make you as he is. But when it comes to opposition, you and you alone will give it, because really there is no opposition. The seeming opponent may be used tomorrow as an aid in fulfilling your desire. What seems today to be a disaster will prove on reflection to be the turning point in your good fortune. That I speak from experience. My father was a junior partner in a small, little grocery business, and his partners ganged up with a few others to get him out, to ease him out of that partnership, and made these false accusations. My father never looked at a book, so he knew nothing of what was going on, and when he was confronted with this false claim he came home and took to his bed for about two or three weeks. He was flat on his back he was so stunned by it all. And they thought they had him exactly where they wanted him, so they got him out giving him nothing of his equity. That was the turning point in our family’s good fortune. From nothing, but I mean absolutely nothing literally, and when he died in ’59 he could leave his family millions and millions of dollars. He had ten children. His wife had died ten years or more before—she died in ’41, he died in ’59. But in 1922 when this thing happened to my father, he simply didn’t know where to turn. But that was the turning point in his life… because he trusted them all. And then he went only on his own with no partners, just himself and my second brother; and he took it from there with a small loan from a friend, and then multiplied and multiplied and multiplied. What it’s worth today I haven’t the slightest idea. I do not know what the businesses are worth, but I do know they run into multiple millions. And he had no formal education, no social background, no contacts in this world at all, but he did believe in this principle and he lived by it. So what seemed to him to be the end of the world was the beginning of his world in the world of Caesar. Every year they get bigger and bigger. You can’t stop it after a while. As long as they have good management you can’t stop it…simply gets bigger. They’re not “holding their own,” they’re simply moving out, moving out and moving out like a conglomerate…can’t stop it. And yet in ’22 no one would have given a farthing for the family. They didn’t have a farthing, they had nothing. But you see, he believed and he really believed it to the point where the whole thing multiplied itself from nothing. It simply became something and then that little something became multiplied. So I tell everyone, I’m speaking from experience, not only in a mystical sense but from Caesar’s world. I’m telling you the story of my family. I’m also telling the story of Christ in me, because the whole thing unfolded within me. So I speak from experience and I’m not theorizing. As I stand here, I’m not in any way theorizing or speculating. The whole story has unfolded itself in me, so I speak from experience.791 ¶52