AUSTRIA AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

Globe, Volume XXI, Issue 1789, 14 November 1879, Page 4

AUSTRIA AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

The Berlin Congress, as all tho world knows, manifested a great, and to say truth, a surprising interest in the spread and establishment of religious liberty. It was not without a certain astonishment that the world saw the representatives of Powers which in this respect had never before been remarkable for their liberality to their own subjects, suddenly themselves concerned to enact that in the new States which they proposed to constitute or recognise persons of all beliefs or no beliefs should equally enjoy civil rights, and that nowhere should difference of belief be made a ground of exclusion and incapacity. It was hoped that a great advance had thus been secured by removing religious faith and worship from civil and political regulations, and from the surveillance of the police. A year has passed away, and at Basle another Congress is being held, not of Plenipotentiaries, but of persons from all parts of Europe and America who take an interest in religious liberty; and at this gathering a memorial has been presented, in which a number of facts are set forth showing that in the territories of at least one of the Great Powers most prominent at the Congress of Berlin religious liberty is trampled on, and religious persecution exists with the knowledge and connivance of the State. In a paper, every allegation of which is sustained by references to persons, times, and places, and which has been prepared by tho well-known American writer, Dr. Thomson, on behalf of the American Board of Missions, it is shown that the local authorities in various parts of AustroHungary refuse to permit religions public worship to any who do not belong to the confessions recognised by law, and even send gendarmes into houses to interrupt worship in tho family if they believe that any stranger is present. At Stupitz, in Bohemia, where a farmer has seen fit to leave the religion in which he was brought up, and had been followed in that course by some of his neighbors, the adherents of tho new form of religion had been fined, imprisoned, and threatened with severe punishment, if they persisted in manifesting their faith. On one occasion at a funeral in the family of a convert, as a prayer was about to be offered, a gendarme stepped forward and forbad it. Of course, it may be said that these are such outbreaks of local bigotry as may bo expected ; but unfortunately they have boon brought under the notice of the higher authorities in vain. We cannot affect to be surprised that the Austrian Government, which preaches religious liberty to Roumanians, Servians, and Bulgarians, should deny it to its own subjects. Nor would wo on any account desire to see it abate its efforts on behalf of the Jews in those Principalities. On the contrary, it may bo hoped that if the Austrian Government will only continue to preach religious liberty to others long enough, it may one day come to believe in that doctrine itself, and finally to come to practice it. But that is looking a long way ahead.