nearly one full week. As a result I got but little value out of one of my most valued Church papers. I was afterward relating this experience to an eminent educator in Denver, when he gave me a similar experience in connection with another New York weekly, The Outlook. Picking up a copy from his table, he said: "Here is a paper that regularly reaches me on Saturday evening, and I invariably read it on Sunday. If it came earlier in the week I would have no time to read it, and by Sunday its freshness would be so nearly gone I would likely have but little disposition to read it."

Distant subscribers will doubtless appreciate the fact that most religious weeklies go to press in the first part of the week chiefly for their benefit, but for "the greatest good to the greatest number" I feel warranted in advocating a change to the other end of the week, especially for all our Methodist weeklies. If all of these official papers with the date of Saturday went to press early Friday morning, and were mailed Friday evening, they could be distributed over an area having a radius of six hundred miles from each publishing center before the post offices would close on Saturday night; and as for distant subscribers, if all mailing were to stop by Saturday noon, so that no Sunday mail train would carry Methodist official literature, and no postal servant employ Sunday in handling papers that are sometimes rife with Conference resolutions against Sabbath desecration-with such an arrangement these distant subscribers would fare as well as they do now, for a New York paper delivered in Omaha on Saturday is pretty largely made up the week previous anyhow. In other words, they would fare about as the majority of subscribers now fare, getting their paper near the middle of the week.

Observation coincides with experience in support of the conviction that our Church papers are read much less than they would be if the majority of subscribers received them on the eve of the Sabbath. In most homes, Methodist with the rest, there is but little reading during the week aside from the daily newspaper. That the Church paper should aim to compete with the Sunday secular in all respects I do not advocate; but that it should use every legitimate plan to engage for itself a larger portion of the principal reading day of the week is a pressing necessity. If there is to be any check to the increasing demand for the Sunday newspaper might not the antidote be found in publishing the Church weekly and putting it into the home a little nearer the time that the secular paper is placed there? Since religious editors have a whole week to prepare one issue, while in that time the secular editors must make seven, it seems that the Church weekly ought to be able to compete with the Sunday secular in general attractiveness, at any rate in Christian homes; and if the Church paper could only be found in those homes on Sunday morning, having some of that freshness which is the chief charm of the Sunday secular, there certainly would be some chance for competition. It may be claimed by some that the news feature is the principal attraction of the Sunday paper, particularly the sensational

news in it, and that in this feature the Church paper can never compete. But it is evident that the publishers of the Sunday paper do not regard this feature as the chief attraction, else why would they put into that paper so much matter in addition to the news? In multitudes of Christian homes there is much more time spent on the Sunday newspaper than would be required in getting the news, sensational and all the rest. Perhaps much is read in that paper which might be found in the library of those very homes, but which would not be read if not found fresh in the newspaper. In this department of general reading the Church paper certainly could compete and would have as good a chance to cultivate a taste for itself as the secular paper has, or nearly so. Of course it could never be quite as fresh as the secular paper on Sunday, but aside from the news it would appear as fresh if it were not seen in the home till Sunday morning.

If our Church papers were published late in the week it might be an experiment worth trying to send them in packages to all the large cities and have them delivered on Saturday night by private carriers. Our "officials" are numerous enough, and published at such centers as to be able to cover all their own territory, with a bare exception or two, by Saturday night if mailed on Friday night. If this, or some similar plan, were undertaken, it would be found that we have not too many official papers, and might even have to add one or two.

The alteration I suggest is certainly not a revolution. It simply asks a change in the time of going to press with our Church papers from the first end of the week to the last. From the standpoint of the subscriber and reader this suggestion seems feasible and advantageous. To editors and publishers it may seem like worthless theorizing. Nevertheless it is hereby submitted, in good faith, for general and charitable consideration. St. Louis, Mo. COLUMBUS BRADFORD.

THE SOUL A SUBSTANTIAL ENTITY.

THE saintly and scholarly Dr. James Strong has left us the result of his readings and reflections on immortality in a little book entitled The Doctrine of a Future Life. In reference to "disembodied spirit" he says: "All information by observation or testimony is shut out; every avenue of external intelligence is closed. . . . No act, properly such, can be put forth by a spirit destitute of all apparatus and opportunity for it. . . . No thought or feeling will occupy the mind but gladness of review, luxury of soul communion, and rapture of anticipation." "There is," says the author, "no tertium quid or intermediate substance between body and spirit."

This seems a bold assertion in face of the latest announcements of science. The very corner stone of the material universe is the atom, a substance unseen; and the fluid that fills the spaces between the rolling worlds is a thing so misty and mysterious that none of the senses can come in touch with it. Who knows but that some subtle substance, al

ready contained within the body, may incase or clothe the soul around, and depart with it, and live with its life, inseparable from its existence ? "There is a spiritual body." "We have . . . a house not made with hands." We desire not to be "unclothed but clothed upon." "Flesh and blood" are ruled out, but not spiritual, or pneumatical, substance. That all the departed saints shall wait for the resurrection without an embodying substance of some kind, as unclothed guests might wait outside a palace because unfit to enter, is a theory which is, to say the least, unproved.

The authors of that profoundly thoughtful book called The Unseen Universe, lay down two general conditions of organized life: "There must be an organ connecting the individual with the past, and there must be such a frame and such a universe that the living being has the power of varied action in the present. . . . We cannot imagine a finite intelligence to exist without organization." They show there is nothing in physical philosophy that can lead us to doubt the existence of immaterial substances. They take the position that, as the physical substance of the visible universe and the beginnings of life must have originated in an invisible universe, and as the present material system is tending to inevi table decay, the laws of continuity and of the conservation of energy make it probable that the available energy of the visible universe will ultimately be appropriated by the ether; and, as a separate existence, the visible universe itself may disappear, "so that we shall have no huge useless, inert mass in far-off ages to remind the passer-by of a species of matter which will then have become long since out of date and functionally effete. Why should not the universe bury its dead out of sight?"

If we are surrounded by an invisible universe it is not unscientific to suppose that souls slip from the one universe into the other, that angelic beings should come and go, and that God himself should reach out a hand divine from a world so near. Supernal forces seem to us as human forces must seem to bees in a hive when a hand intrudes, or to ants when a human footstep makes itself felt on their lowly roof. Incarnation, resurrection, ascension, providential interposition, are like gleams of sunlight through the windows of a home. The spiritual world is not an unnatural world, but an overshadowing and encircling sphere of being which receives the redeemed of earth and crowns them with fullness of life.

Such a view of the heavenly world accords with facts of Scripture and experience Stephen's rapturous vision, John's apocalyptic glimpses of glory, Jacob's wondrous dream, the sight of celestial chariots that met the opened spiritual sense of Elisha's servant, the strange sweet recognitions of saintly men and women in all ages as they have lingered on the confines of the future world. Spirit forms may be seen by the inner sense, but not spirits without forms. Heaven is not a world of shadows, but a world of sentient, substantial souls. Innate longings go out toward a natural and human heaven-not toward a dreamy and shadowy sphere occupied by beings in transitu, waiting in calin and trancelike state for

the resurrection, the second advent, and the judgment day to inaugurate their real life.

The poet Tennyson, who, in his masterpiece, "In Memoriam," shows such keen insight into humanity and its hopes, is said to have remarked: "I believe that, beside our material body, we have an immaterial body, something like what the Egyptians called the Ka. . . . The spirit flashes out of this shadow into substance." Is this not both scriptural and sensible? Thurlow, Pa. T. M. GRIFFITH.

...

IS DR. WHEELER RIGHT?

ON page 169 of the January-February number, in a review of Dr. D. H. Wheeler's Our Industrial Utopia, and Its Unhappy Citizens, occurs this statement: "Notable, too, is his approval of the theory concerning land that it has no value except what has been put into it by labor, which of itself is a refutation of Henry George's doctrine of government ownership and the single tax." I greatly wonder that so clear a thinker as is Dr. Wheeler should fail to see the one-sidedness of the "theory" to which he gives his "approval." Land and labor depend each upon the other for its value. Labor is absolutely helpless except land supply it with raw material. Land is absolutely valueless except labor transform it into wealth. Land and labor are the two coordinated legs upon which society perambulates. No substitute for the coordination, nor for either of the legs, can be found. Destroy the coordination, and society is unbalanced; labor, and it tumbles; land, and it is helplessly crippled. In the statement under consideration let the terms "land" and "labor " exchange places, and it would be no further from the truth than as it now stands. A much nearer approach, however, to the whole truth is made in the proposition that both derive all the value they possess from association with each other. We conclude, therefore, that Dr. Wheeler has given his "approval " to a very untrustworthy "theory."

What disposition shall be made of wealth, the joint product of land and labor? Consider, in answering, that labor (brain and brawn) is the gift of God (nature) to the individual, and that land is the gift of God (nature) to the race. In order to produce profit (wages or rent) the individual and the race must form a copartnership. In the enterprise the individual must invest his worthless labor; the race, its valueless land. The profits should be divided accordingly. Wages, the profit of labor by virtue of its association with land, should accrue to the individual. See Luke x, 7. Rent, the profit of land by virtue of its association with labor, should accrue to the race. See Eccles. v, 9.

We conclude, therefore, that wages should belong to the individual producing them; that land rents should be collected by the government for the people; and that this "is of itself a "substantiation "of Henry George's doctrine of " common "ownership and the single tax." He who has a more equitable, natural, and scriptural doctrine has a great opportunity to become famous. J. L. VALLOW.

Durango, Colo.

THE ITINERANTS' CLUB.

"BAPTIZED FOR THE DEAD."-1 COR. XV, 29.

THE passages of Scripture which perplex modern critics were equally perplexing to the early Church. One would suppose that the enlightenment and critical skill of the present age would have been successful in clearing up these difficult passages; but many problems still remain to be solved, and the work of the exegete has not been superseded. The early expositors are still the fountain whence we draw our most satisfactory explanations of Scripture.

The passage under consideration is one upon which much learning, and especially much conjecture, have been expended. "What shall they do which are baptized for the dead?" It is clear that there was in the early Church a baptism for the dead the exact nature of which has not been made known to us. An exhaustive catalogue of interpretations may be found in the critical commentaries. We give the list furnished by Dean Stanley as an example of the vagaries of exegesis. The interpretation adopted by Dean Stanley is, "Those who are baptized vicariously for the dead." Other interpretations are: 1. "What shall they gain who are baptized for the removal of their dead works?" 2. "What shall they gain who are baptized for the hope of the resurrection of the dead?", (Chrysostom.) 3. "What shall they gain who are baptized into the death of Christ?" 4. "What shall they gain who are afflicted (compare Luke xii, 50; Mark x, 38) for the hope of the resurrection of the dead?" 5. What shall they gain who are baptized at the moment of death, with a view to their state when dead" (alluding to the practice of deathbed baptisms) ? 6. "What shall they gain who are baptized into the place of the dead martyrs?" 7. "What shall they gain who are baptized into the name of the dead (John and Christ)?" 8. "What shall they gain who are baptized in order to convert those who are dead in sin?" 9. "What shall they gain who are baptized only to die?" 10. "What shall they gain who are baptized over the graves of the dead" (that is, the martyrs, etc.)? 11. "What shall they gain who are baptized when dying, as a sign that their dead bodies shall be raised ? " 12. "What shall they gain who are baptized for the good of the Christian dead; that is, to hasten the day of the resurrection by accomplishing the number of the elect?"

The selection among these must be largely a matter of conjecture and of greater or less probability, for none of them is entirely free from difficulties. Dean Stanley's view, that our text is an allusion to the practice of "vicarious baptism," is probably the prevalent one. It is said that there was a custom of the Corinthians of the first century, and afterward of the Marcionites, to baptize a living person in behalf of one who had died In the faith, but unbaptized. It was baptism by proxy. It is generally agreed that this is the most natural meaning of the passage. The objec