Calvin notes, ‘we observe the general rule that we cannot pray properly as we ought, without praising God at the same time.’17 That is certainly true, but there was something else at work in that Roman prison that midnight, what James Stewart once referred to as ‘the indescribable gusto of the early Christian voice.’ ‘This wonderful sense of energy, exhilaration and vitality which meets you on every page of the New Testament; these men are almost uncannily efficient … supremely adequate to life’s