A Bold Plea for the Easement of Suffering of these Confessed and Reading Red Saints

Rev. John Eliot
King Philip’s War
Massachusetts, 1675

The sermon of the day is: physicians, books, the lost tribe of knowledge is forecast to unmanifest its fatal arrows: operate in this drastic forest of articulate sounds, please send bread and fish: starving guttural sounds aspirate at back the throat (where we shy from letting our own thoughts go even so deep: the way we think Devil where Oak and Fir cloak their universal sense and church, their not having words and we have nothing to carry them outside our own tongues: For he that speaketh in an unkown tongue speaketh not unto man, but unto God). Sirs, four hundred saved red souls starve on Deer Isle, selecting stones, as other sermons run to prophecies and fort defense: daily we drown in discovering loose heads strewn on the highway, as in the Bible: we must translate this universal nourishment to all tongues: every instrument set to work does press for pay, and in this desert the sermon of the day prays the biggest boats closer, waves the marked arm rising off Death Isle, says bring budgets and bring butter and that best Word: the least generous omniscience of our own utter limit unto death (or coming into sight) of those yet tasting what charity and what, already, we are capable of having done. What? came the word of God out from you? or did it come to you only? The press needs also twelve pounds each of fresh k’s and l ’s to conform this ancient Hebraic language to the rules of our alphabet.