s
animal; at length the writer comes to a table showing the probable
duration of life at certain ages. "You will observe," he says, "1st,
that the age of seven is that at which you may hope a longer life; 2d,
that at twelve or thirteen you have lived a quarter of your life; at
twenty-eight or twenty-nine you have lived half; at fifty more than
three-quarters." And then he suddenly winds up the whole performance by
the exclamation: "O ye who have laboured up to fifty, who are in the
enjoyment of comfort, and who still have left to you health and
strength, what then are you waiting for before you take rest? How long
will you go on saying _To-morrow, to-morrow?_"

There are many casual brilliancies in the way of analogy and parallel,
many aptnesses of thought and phrase. The Stoics are called the
Jansenists of Paganism. "For a single blade of grass to grow, it is
necessary that the whole of nature should co-operate." "A man comes to
Pyrrhonism by one of two opposite ways; either because he does not know
enough, or because he knows too much; the latter is not the most common
way." And so forth.

If we turn to the group of articles dealing with theology, it is
difficult for us to know exactly where we are. Sometimes Diderot writes
of popular superstitions with the gravity proper to a dictionary of
mythology. Sometimes he sews on to the sober gray of his scepticism a
purple patch of theistic declamation.[178] The article on Jesus Christ
is obviously a mere piece of common form, and more than one passage in
his article on _Christianisme_ is undoubtedly insincere. When we come to
his more careful article, _Providence_, we find it impossible to extract
from it a body of coherent propositions of which we could confidently
say that they represented his own creed, or the creed that he desired
his readers to bear away in their minds.

It is hardly worth while to measure the more or the less of his
adherence to Christianity, or even to Deism, as inferred from the
Encyclopaedia. We need only turn to his private letters to find that he
is in no degree nor kind an adherent, but the most hardy, contemptuous,
and thoroughgoing of opponents. At the risk of shocking devout persons,
I am bound to reproduce a passage from one of his letters, in which
there can be no doubt that we have Diderot's true mind, as distinguished
from what it was convenient to print. "The Christian religion," he says,
"is to my mind the most absurd and atrocious i