I admit at the beginning that popular religion demotic religion the pieties of the common folk tends to sink to the lowest common denominator be it in syncretizing saints with old half-forgotten pagan godlings or in preferring the nasal whine and the revivalist shoutin to solid sense and learning regarding intellect as positively inimical to the workings of the Holy Ghost. But it is in American religious life especially Protestant American religious life that things bottom out completely.

Regarding Jabezs Prayer I will say at once that I am a very poor Christian and indeed a bad man. My besetting sins are many and the least of them are the fleshlier ones the really deadly ones are pride and intellectual arrogance. But I can honestly say I have never sunk to confusing prayer the souls colloquy with the Creator mortal mans dialogue with the Deity with magical incantation and the ritual of the spell.