t that Moses did not know it. 'Tis this world that is
hell."[120]

D'Alembert in reply always admitted the blemishes for which the
patriarch and master reproached them, but urged various pleas in
extenuation. He explains that Diderot is not always the master, either
to reject or to prune the articles that are offered to him.[121] A
writer who happened to be useful for many excellent articles would
insist as the price of good work that they should find room for his bad
work also; and so forth. "No doubt we have bad articles in theology and
metaphysics, but with theologians for censors, and a privilege, I defy
you to make them any better. There are other articles that are less
exposed to the daylight, and in them all is repaired. Time will enable
people to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said."[122]
This last is a bitter and humiliating word, but before any man hastens
to cast a stone, let him first make sure that his own life is free from
every trace of hypocritical conformity and mendacious compliance.
Condorcet seems to make the only remark that is worth making, when he
says that the true shame and disgrace of these dissemblings lay not with
the writers, whose only other alternative was to leave the stagnation
of opinion undisturbed, but with the ecclesiastics and ministers whose
tyranny made dissimulation necessary. And the veil imposed by authority
did not really serve any purpose of concealment. Every reader was let
into the secret of the writer's true opinion of the old mysteries, by
means of a piquant phrase, an adroit parallel, a significant reference,
an equivocal word of dubious panegyric. Diderot openly explains this in
the pages of the Encyclopaedia itself. "In all cases," he says, "where a
national prejudice would seem to deserve respect, the particular article
ought to set it respectfully forth, with its whole procession of
attractions and probabilities. But the edifice of mud ought to be
overthrown and an unprofitable heap of dust scattered to the wind, by
references to articles in which solid principles serve as a base for the
opposite truths. This way of undeceiving men operates promptly on minds
of the right stamp, and it operates infallibly and without any
troublesome consequences, secretly and without disturbance, on minds of
every description."[123] "Our fanatics feel the blows," cried D'Alembert
complacently, "though they are sorely puzzled to tell from which side
they come."[124]