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.”