conspire to keep our prayers brief. Our generation certainly needs to learn something more about persistence in prayer, and to that point I shall return in a later chapter. Even so, that is not quite what the Puritans meant when they exhorted one another to “pray until you pray.” What they meant is that Christians should pray long enough and honestly enough, at a single session, to get past the feeling of formalism and unreality that attends not a little praying. We are especially prone to such feelings