This editorial from the 1887 Juvenile Instructor could appear in any Church magazine today, merely updated by modifying the names of countries and languages. It’s only one of many fields that we could cite showing how the learning of “the world” must be brought into the service of the Kingdom.

No people in the world have greater need of a knowledge of various languages than the Latter-day Saints. We often think there is not near the attention paid to this in our educational system that there should be. We constantly need missionaries to go to the nations. Our principal labor, heretofore, has been among the English-speaking races, with the exception of the nations occupying the Scandinavian peninsula. But we have many and increasing calls for elders who can speak the Spanish, to labor among the Spanish-speaking races, which are very numerous south of the line of the United States. How few there are, however, who have sufficient knowledge of this language to respond to the call for missionaries to labor in those countries!

There are many countries in Europe which have not been visited by our elders. No elder that we know of has visited either Spain or Portugal. Italy has had some few missionaries within her borders. Austria has been visited, yet but little labor has been performed within that empire among its many nationalities. Germany, though considerably visited, is about untouched; millions of the German-speaking people know nothing of the gospel of Christ as revealed to us. Within the confines of the Russian empire we have heard of no elder lifting his voice to proclaim the restoration of the gospel to the earth. The silence of ages, which has existed in the Danubian principalities concerning the pure gospel of the Son of God, is still unbroken by the voices of legally-authorized servants of God.

If one were to sail from San Francisco for the western borders of Asia, and not stop at the Sandwich Islands, he could travel from there to the Alps in Europe without finding an organized branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and very likely without finding a man, except perhaps at Constantinople, throughout that vast and most populous region who holds the authority to administer any of the ordinances of the gospel!

We think we have done considerable in preaching the gospel, and so we have; but look at the map of the world and see how much of it there is yet to be warned by the visits and preaching of our elders. Our children who are growing up need to search and study, and by the aid of the gifts of tongues and the interpretation of tongues, acquire a knowledge of languages so as to fit them for the duties, which may be required of them, as elders, in visiting the various nations.

The gospel has to be preached to the Gentiles and also after that to the Jews. When we say Jews, all the nations descended from Israel are included. the hundreds of tribes of Indians come under the name of Jews and many of the Asiatic and Polynesian races.

The field of labor before us is an immense one, and we have only worked a little on its edges. But the gospel is being introduced into Oriental lands. Already Constantinople has been visited and elders are laboring there. The gospel has been carried from there into Palestine, and the day does not seem far distant when the elders of the Church will find occupation in preaching the new heavenly message in the lands which have been made historic by the labors of the prophets and apostles mentioned in the bible.

In view of all this the study of languages should occupy an important place in our system of education. Our young people should become good linguists, at least all those who have a taste for this branch of study.