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 railroad 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 wheiher 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
with 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 "square."
That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally
practice without having a gospel car.