What do you think of this word? It contains forty-two letters.

What does it mean? What language is it? It means “catechism.” It is the Indian language.

Now for the story. Many years ago, soon after the landing of the first Pilgrim Fathers in New England, there was a man by the name of John Eliot, who came to this new and unsettled country of America. He was a devoted Christian, an earnest, patient, persistent missionary. He lived for sixty years in Massachusetts, and most of those years were spent among the redskins who inhabited that section. He loved them, worked with them, learned their language, reduced it to writing, then translated for them the Scriptures. He was called, and he is still known by the name, “Apostle to the Indians.” The word at the head of the page shows what labors he entered into. All this was made possible through putting into practice his own motto, “Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ, will do anything.”

What good John Eliot did for the Indians some one must have done for the human race. Who invented the first alphabet? Who conceived the idea of letters? Who planned out the putting of certain letters together to form a word, then placing certain words in a string to form a sentence, that sentence conveying an idea? Who did all this? We do not know. The blessed work has gone on, until the knowledge of letters is so taken for granted that we have a saying, “as plain as ABC.”

The Bible has almost kept pace with language. There are few languages to-day into which the Word has not been translated. We shall not rest until every child of every tongue is able to read God’s message of love and salvation in the language in which he was born.

MEMORY VERSE, Luke 4: 16

“And Jesus came to Nazareth ... and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up for to read.”

MEMORY HYMN

"O word of God incarnate."