A man sitting in the audience had been permanently let go from his job a few weeks earlier; Neville heard for him the news that he was gainfully employed, and the man told Neville just before the lecture began that he had been transferred to a new job at over $13,000, a hundred-odd miles away.

A woman in her seventies with no money slept for nine or ten days assuming her house repaired, painted and paid for; within a month it was all done, funded by a $7,500 legacy from a woman in England she had never met, and Neville told her story in his latest book.

Neville retells a story he had first shared with a San Francisco audience: a woman who had just learned her brother was court-martialled and sentenced to six months' hard labour spent a solid week imagining, each morning over breakfast, that the doorbell rang and she ran downstairs to embrace him home again. The following Sunday, before she even reached the meeting, her brother was retried, honourably discharged, and came home -- and she rose before a thousand people at the San Francisco meeting to tell her story on the spot.

A woman who had moved through several denominations before being baptized Catholic to please the man she loved wrote Neville describing a dream she had during her Catholic instruction in April 1963. In it she was shown the Holy of Holies behind a black curtain, only to find nothing but a box of ashes, an apothecary jar, and a dead bone — an experience so unsettling that she could not continue with the church's teaching afterward. Neville reads the bone as the biblical rod of Aaron kept behind the temple veil, and the whole vision as a true glimpse of the mystery that God must die within a man, like a buried seed, before he can rise again as that man's own life.

Neville's wife told him that someone who had come to his meetings asked a teacher in the city what he thought of Blake, and the teacher answered that Blake was mad and insane.

Three weeks before, a lady met Neville in the back room where he speaks to discuss wanting a position no woman had held in a company with resources over half a billion dollars; he told her to occupy it as though it were true, and three weeks later she was appointed loan counselor, the first woman ever; she gave him a letter on Friday night and he told the story last Sunday morning without names.

A man in Neville's audience had been let go from his job a few weeks earlier under terms he was told were permanent. Neville had encouraged him to persist in assuming good news regardless, and that same evening, just before Neville took the platform, the man told him he had been transferred to a new job paying in excess of thirteen thousand dollars -- more than he had made before.

Last Tuesday night the friend who drives him home from his lectures told him he had been thinking over Neville's teaching to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, and offered the phrase "Try it on for size" as a way of putting it.