How long is it possible to keep a secret?  I know of several that were kept for thousands of years.

First,  I need to explain about silk.  Silk is a strong fiber used to make the most beautiful and prized fabrics.  It is naturally shiny, highly elastic, and is the strongest of all natural fibers.  It is stronger than the same size of thread made of steel.  Silk garments can be stretched and will return to their original shape.  They’re warmer than cotton and lighter than linen, resist wrinkling, and take dyes beautifully.  Silk is the queen of fibers.

Silk is made from the cocoons of silkworms.  A large, white moth lays its eggs on mulberry trees.  The larva which hatch from the eggs eat mulberry leaves.  When the larva are ready to pupate they secrete two threads of silk from glands beneath their lower jaws and wrap themselves in large cocoons.

The cocoons are soaked in basins of hot water that dissolve the substance that glues one silk filament to the others.  As the cocoons bob about in the basin, the threads from several cocoons are fed together through a porcelain guide.  The cocoons are unwound, and spools of shiny silk thread are produced.

Under the threat of disgrace and death the secret of the silkworm was closely guarded by the Chinese for over 3,000 years!  The Persians made fortunes by sending camel caravans to China to purchase silk which they in turn sold to Europeans at fabulously high prices.  The Persians had a monopoly on the silk trade for many hundreds of years.  They controlled all the silk that came out of China.

The Roman emperor, Justinian, determined to break the Persian monopoly on silk.  Failing to find another trade route that would bypass Persia, he sent two monks to China as spies.  The monks learned the secret of silk making and smuggled out silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds in hollow bamboo canes.

The secret was finally out.  That was in about the year A.D. 550.  The Chinese had successfully safeguarded their secret from about 2,700 B.C.

This couldn’t have happened in our interconnected and technological age.  Yet, amazingly, there are other millennia-old secrets that much of the world has yet to discover.  These “secrets” are all laid out in plain sight, but they remain largely undiscovered because people either don’t want to know them, or have judged them as foolish or useless.

The first is that Jesus is the Christ, and the Redeemer of the world.  “There is none other name given under heaven save...Jesus Christ...whereby man can be saved.”  (2 Nephi 25:20).

The Chinese don’t know that.  Neither do the Hindus or the Muslims.  Even most Christians fail to grasp who Jesus really is and what He has done for us.

The second “secret” is that the Savior’s Church and gospel have been restored.  Through a series of fantastic, breath-taking visions and revelations a modern prophet was called and educated.  Knowledge was imparted to the world.  Ancient, eternal, and crucial covenants and ordinances which had been lost were restored to the earth and made available to all who would heed and obey.

The third “secret” is a new book of scripture, another testament of Jesus Christ.  The book is filled with details about the culture, society, history, and destruction of two ancient civilizations that formerly inhabited the American continent.  Archaeologists and historians painstakingly sift through soils and ancient records of every kind looking for clues to these civilizations which rivaled and excelled their Mesopotamian and Roman contemporaries.  Their painstaking searches largely ignore the book that contains the best record of the information they’re seeking.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with its testimony of Christ and its new book of scripture is the best-kept secret in the world.  The irony of it all is that we don’t wish it to be a secret.  All the world needs to know that salvation comes only in and through Jesus Christ.  The world needs to know that He’s coming again—and soon—and that everyone must be ready if they are to abide the day of His coming.

The Restoration of the Gospel must not be kept secret.  It is our duty to spread the word.  Disgrace, in this case, will not come by disclosing the secret, but by failing to do so.