declaring their emancipation. It numbers hardly a thousand members after several years, and even of these, many are officially claimed on the records of religious communities. A law was passed in Austria to legalize the act of withdrawing from the church, but less than five hundred persons have availed themselves of its privileges and of this number, the majority were not persons constrained by their sense of honor to bring their outward lives into harmony with their inward convictions, but were either persons of different religions who wished to be united in matrimony and met on neutral ground by mutually renouncing the religion in which they had been brought up, or else Jews, who fancied they could escape from the popular prejudice against their race, by proclaiming officially the fact that they had renounced the faith of their fathers. This latter motive came into play so frequently that the terms Jew and "creedless" became almost synonymous in Austria, so that the secretary of the Vienna University used to remark good-naturedly. "Why don't you say right out that you are a Jew?" when some candidate for admission to the University, replied. "Creedless," when asked to what religion he belonged―one of the usual questions put to candidates. France is the country where liberty of thought has obtained from the laws, but not from society, the most extensive concessions from the yoke of Religion. But even in France, a large majority of the freethinkers remain in the bosom of the church to which their parents belonged, they go to mass and confession, they are wedded before the altar, they bring their children to be baptized and confirmed, and they summon the priest to the bedside of their dying friends. The number of those who bring up their children without baptism or confirmation, is very small, and still fewer express a wish for a so-called civil funeral.
