KUMMOGOKDONATTOOTTAMMOCTITEAONGANNUNNONASH


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