n its dogmas; the most
unintelligible, the most metaphysical, the most intertwisted and
obscure, and consequently the most subject to divisions, sects, schisms,
heresies; the most mischievous for the public tranquillity, the most
dangerous to sovereigns by its hierarchic order, its persecutions, its
discipline; the most flat, the most dreary, the most Gothic, and the
most gloomy in its ceremonies; the most puerile and unsociable in its
morality, considered not in what is common to it with universal
morality, but in what is peculiarly its own, and constitutes it
evangelical, apostolical, and Christian morality, which is the most
intolerant of all. Lutheranism, freed from some absurdities, is
preferable to Catholicism; Protestantism to Lutheranism, Socinianism to
Protestantism, Deism, with temples and ceremonies, to Socinianism. Since
it is necessary that man, being superstitious by nature, should have a
fetish, the simplest and most harmless will be the best fetish."[179] We
need not discuss nor extend the quotation; enough has been said to
relieve us from the duty of analysing or criticising articles in which
Christianity is treated with all the formal respect that the secular
authority insisted upon.

This formal respect is not incompatible with many veiled and secret
sarcasms, which were as well understood as they were sharply enjoyed by
those who read between the lines. It is not surprising that these
sarcasms were constantly unjust and shallow. Even those of us who
repudiate theology and all its works for ourselves, may feel a shock at
the coarseness and impurity of innuendo which now and then disfigures
Diderot's treatment of theological as of some other subjects. For this
the attitude of the Church itself was much to blame; coarse, virulent,
unspiritual as it was in France in those days. Voltaire, Diderot,
Holbach, would have written in a very different spirit, even while
maintaining and publishing the same attacks on theological opinion, if
the Church of France had possessed such a school of teachers as the
Church of England found in the Latitudinarians in the seventeenth
century; or such as she finds now in the nineteenth century in those who
have imported, partly from the poetry of Wordsworth, partly from the
historic references of the Oxford Tracts, an equity, a breadth, an
elevation, a pensive grace, that effectually forbid the use of those
more brutal weapons of controversy which were the only weapons possib