sovereign pontiffs, against
bishops, against all the orders of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that
have covered priest, altar, and creed with opprobrium. If the pope, the
bishops, the priests, the simple faithful, the whole church, if its
mysteries, its sacraments, its temples, its ceremonies, have fallen into
contempt, yours, yours, is the handiwork."[130]

Bourdaloue more than half a century before had taunted the free-thinkers
of his day with falseness and inconsistency in taking sides with the
Jansenists, whose superstitions they notoriously held in open contempt.
The motive for the alliance was tolerably obvious. The Jansenists, apart
from their theology, were above all else the representatives of
opposition to authority. It was for this that Lewis XIV. counted them
worse than atheists. The Jesuits, it has been well said in keeping down
their enemies by force, became the partisans of absolute government,
and upheld it on every occasion. The Jansenists, after they had been
crushed by violence, began to feel to what excesses power might be
brought. From being speculative enemies to freedom as a theory, they
became, through the education of persecution, the partisans of freedom
in practice. The quarrel of Molinists and Jansenists, from a question of
theology, grew into a question of human liberty.[131]

Circumstances had now changed. The free-thinkers were becoming strong
enough to represent opposition to authority on their own principles and
in their own persons. Diderot's vigorous remonstrance with the bishop of
Auxerre incidentally marks for us the definite rupture of philosophic
sympathy for the Jansenist champions. "It is your disputatiousness," he
said, "which within the last forty years has made far more unbelievers
than all the productions of philosophy." As we cannot too clearly
realise, it was the flagrant social incompetence of the church which
brought what they called Philosophy, that is to say Liberalism, into
vogue and power. Locke's Essay had been translated in 1700, but it had
made no mark, and as late as 1725 the first edition of the translation
remained unsold. It was the weakness and unsightly decrepitude of the
ecclesiastics which opened the way for the thinkers.

This victory, however, was not yet. Diderot had still a dismal
wilderness to traverse. He was not without secret friends even in the
camp of his enemies.

After his reply to Pere Berthier's attack on the Prospectus, he
received an ano