partly
because it came earliest in the literature of attack. It was an
audacious surprise. The censor who had allowed it to pass the ordeal of
official approval was cashiered, and the author was dismissed from an
honorary post in the Queen's household.[97] The indictment described the
book as "the code of the most hateful and infamous passions," as a
collection into one cover of everything that impiety could imagine,
calculated to engender hatred against Christianity and Catholicism. The
court condemned the book to be burnt, and, as if to show that the motive
was not mere discontent with Helvetius's paradoxes, the same fire
consumed Voltaire's fine poem on Natural Religion. Less prejudiced
authorities thought nearly as ill of the book, as the lawyers of the
parliament and the doctors of the Sorbonne had thought. Rousseau
pronounced it detestable, wrote notes in refutation of its principles,
and was inspired by hatred of its doctrine to compose some of the most
fervid pages in the Savoyard Vicar's glowing Profession of Faith.[98]
Even Diderot, though his friendly feeling for the writer and his general
leaning to speculative hardihood warped his judgment so far as to make
him rank _L'Esprit_ along with Montesquieu's _Spirit of Laws_, and
Buffon's _Natural History_, among the great books of the century, still
perceived and showed that the whole fabric rested on a foundation of
paradox, and that, though there might be many truths of detail in the
book, very many of its general principles are false.[99] Turgot
described it as a book of philosophy without logic, literature without
taste, and morality without goodness.[100]

[97] Barbier, vii. 137.

[98] _Oeuv._, xii. 301.

[99] _Ib._ ii. 267-274.

[100] _Ib._ ii. 795.

In the same weighty piece of criticism, which contains in two or three
pages so much permanently valuable truth, Turgot proceeds:--"When people
wish to attack intolerance and injustice, it is essential in the first
place to rest upon just ideas, for inquisitors have an interest in being
intolerant, and viziers and subviziers have an interest in maintaining
all the abuses of the government. As they are the strongest, you only
give them a good excuse by sounding the tocsin against them right and
left. I hate despotism as much as most people; but it is not by
declamations that despotism ought to be attacked. And even in despotism
there are degrees; there is a multitude of abuses in despotism