Of course, to be fair to Zechariah it may be that he and his wife had gone on praying only so long as they were still of normal childbearing age, when all that they were asking the Creator to do was to give nature a little push forward to get on with the job which the Creator had designed her to do. They were long past that age now. For them to have a child now would require the Creator’s intervention to put the processes of ageing and decay into reverse. Perhaps, then, they had ceased praying for