be in straits to get our living if the Kingdom be delayed in its coming, for what good are fishermen except along the sea coast or where there is a lake or a river, and here there isn't enough water for a minnow to swim in. Our wives and our children are better off than we are, for they'll be getting someone to fish for them, and will stand at the doors at Capernaum waiting for the boats to return, praying that the nets weren't let down in vain; but we aren't as sure of the Kingdom as we were of a great take of fishes in Galilee when the wind was favourable to fishing. Not that we'd have you think our faith be failing us; we be as firm as ever we were, as John and James will be telling you. And Peter, interrupting them again, reminded Joseph that if they lacked faith the promised Kingdom would not come. It was Jesus' faith that upheld us, John said, pushing Peter aside, and the promises he made us that we might hear the trumpets of the cherubims and seraphims announcing the Kingdom at any moment of the day or night. And making himself the spokesman of the five, John told Joseph and Nicodemus that Jesus now looked upon the arrival of the Kingdom as a very secondary matter, and his own death as one of much greater import. He says that he'll have to give his blood to the earth and his flesh to the birds of the air else none will believe his teaching. He says that God demands a victim; and looks upon him as the victim; but if that be so, the world will get his teaching and we shall get nothing, for we know his teaching of old. As Peter has told you, James interrupted, there be no water here, not a spring nor a rivulet, nothing in which a fish could live; we're fishermen stranded in a desert without boats or nets, which would be of no use to us, nor am I gainsaying it; but if he gives himself as a victim how shall we get back to Galilee? He now talks not of these matters to us, but of his Father only, and of doing his Father's will. He seems to have forgotten us, and everything else but his Father and his Father's will, and we cannot make him understand when we try that we shall want money, that money will be wanting to get us back to Galilee, nor does he hear us when we say: our nets and our boats may have passed into other hands. We know not what is come over him; he's a changed man; a lamb as long as you're agreeing with him, but at a word of contradiction he's all claws and teeth.