Because there are cars for the luxurious, and smoking cars for those
who delight in tobacco, some of the religious people of Connecticut are
petitioning the railway companies to fit up “Gospel cars.” Instead
of the card tables they want an organ and piano, they want the seats
arranged facing the centre of the car, so they can have a full view of
whoever may conduct the services; instead of spittoons they will have
a carpet, and instead of cards they want Bibles and Gospel
song-books.--_Chicago News_.
There is an idea for you. Let some railroad company fit up a Gospel car
according to the above prescription, and run it, and the porter on that
car would be the most lonesome individual on the train. The Gospel hymn
books would in a year appear as new as do now the Bibles that are put up
in all cars. Of the millions of people who ride in the trains, many of
them pious Christians, who has ever seen a man or woman take a Bible
off the iron rack and read it a single minute? And yet you can often see
ministers and other professing Christians in the smoking car, puffing a
cigar and reading a daily paper.
Why, it is all they can do to get a congregation in a church on Sunday;
and does any one suppose that when men and women are traveling for
business or pleasure--and they do not travel for anything else--that
they are going into a “Gospel car” to listen to some sky pirate who has
been picked up for the purpose, talk about the prospects of landing the
cargo in heaven?
Not much!
The women are too much engaged looking after their baggage, and keeping
the cinders out of their eyes, and keeping the children's heads out of
the window, and keeping their fingers from being jammed, to look out for
their immortal souls. And the men are too much absorbed in the object of
their trip to listen to gospel truths. They are thinking about whether
they will be able to get a room at the hotel, or whether they will have
to sleep on a cot.
Nobody can sing gospel songs on a car, with their throats full of
cinders, and their eyes full of dust, and the chances are if anybody
should strike up, “A charge to keep I have,” some pious sinner who was
trying to take a nap in the corner of the gospel car would say:
“O, go and hire a hall!”
It would be necessary to make an extra charge of half a dollar to those
who occupied the gospel car, the same as is charged on the parlor car,
and you wouldn't get two persons on an average train full that would put
up a nickel.
Why, we know a Wisconsin Christian, worth a million dollars, who, when
he comes up from Chicago to the place where he lives, hangs up his
overcoat in the parlor car, and then goes into the forward car and rides
till the whistle blows for his town, when he goes in and gets his coat
and never says thirty-five cents to the conductor, or ten cents to the
porter. Do you think a gospel car would catch him for half a dollar? He
would see you in Hades first.
The best way is to take a little eighteen carat religion along into the
smoking car, or any other car you may happen to be in.
A man--as we understand religion from those who have had it--does not
have to howl to the accompaniment of an asthmatic organ, pumped by a
female with a cinder in her eye and smut on her nose, in order to enjoy
religion, and he does not have to be in the exclusive company of other
pious people to get the worth of his money. There is a great deal of
religion in sitting in a smoking car, smoking dog-leg tobacco in
a briar-wood pipe, and seeing happy faces in the smoke that curls
up--faces of those you have made happy by kind words, good deeds, or
half a dollar put where it will drive away hunger, instead of paying it
out for a reserved seat in a gospel car. Take the half dollar you would
pay for a seat in a gospel car and go into the smoker, and find some
poor emigrant that is going west to grow up with the country, after
having been beaten out of his money at Castle Garden, and give it to
him, and see if the look of thankfulness and joy does not make you feel
better than to listen to a discussion in the gospel car, as to whether
the children of Israel went through the Red Sea with life-preservers, or
wore rubber hunting boots.
Take your gospel-car half dollar and buy a vegetable ivory rattle of the
train boy, and give it to the sick emigrant mother's pale baby, and
you make four persons happy--the baby, the mother, the train boy and
yourself.
We know a man who gave a dollar to a prisoner on the way to State
prison, to buy tobacco with, who has enjoyed more good square religion
over it than he could get out of all the chin music and saw-filing
singing he could hear in a gospel car in ten years. The prisoner was a
bad man from Oshkosh, who was in a caboose in charge of the sheriff,
on the way to Waupun. The attention of the citizen was called to
the prisoner by his repulsive appearance, and his general
don't-care-a-damative appearance. The citizen asked the prisoner how he
was fixed for money to buy tobacco in prison. He said he hadn't a cent,
and he knew it would be the worst punishment he could have to go without
tobacco. The citizen gave him the dollar and said:
“Now, every time you take a chew of tobacco in prison, just make up your
mind to be square when you get out.”
The prisoner reached out his hand-cuffed hands to take the dollar, the
hands trembling so that the chains rattled, and a great tear as big as
a shirt-button appeared in one eye--the other eye had been gouged out
while “having some fun with the boys” at Oshkosh--and his lips trembled
as he said:
“So help me God, I will!”
That man has been boss of a gang of hands in the pinery for two winters,
and has a farm paid for on the Central Railroad, and is “squar.”
That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally
practice without having a gospel car.