the law of nature; therefore it has taught us nothing new upon morality.  The revealed law has brought us no new truth; for what is a truth but a proposition referring to an object, conceived in terms which present clear ideas to me, and the connection of which with one another is intelligible to me?  Now revealed religion has introduced no such propositions to us.  What it has added to the natural law consists of five or six propositions which are not a whit more intelligible to me than if they were expressed in ancient Carthaginian, inasmuch as the ideas represented by the terms, and the connection among these ideas, escape me entirely."[38]

There is no sign in this piece that Diderot had examined the positive grounds of natural religion, or that he was ready with any adequate answer to the argument which Butler had brought forward in the previous decade of the century.  We do not see that he is aware as yet of there being as valid objections on his own sceptical principles to the alleged data of naturalistic deism, as to the pretensions of a supernatural religion.  He was content with Shaftesbury’s position.

Shaftesbury’s influence on Diderot was permanent.  It did not long remain so full and entire as it was now in the sphere of religious belief, but the traces of it never disappeared from his notions on morals and art.  Shaftesbury’s cheerfulness and geniality in philosophising were thoroughly sympathetic to Diderot.  The optimistic harmony which the English philosopher, coming after Leibnitz, assumed as the starting-point of his ethical and religious ideas, was not only highly congenial to Diderot’s sanguine temperament; it was a most attractive way of escape from the disorderly and confused theological wilderness of sin, asceticism, miracle, and the other monkeries.  This naturalistic religion may seem a very unsafe and comfortless halting-place to us.  But to men who heard of religion only in connection with the Bull Unigenitus and confessional certificates, with some act of intolerance or cruelty, with futile disputes about grace and the Five Propositions, the naturalism which Shaftesbury taught in prose and Pope versified was like the dawn after the foulness of night.  Those who wished to soften the inhuman rigour of the criminal procedure of the time[39] used to appeal from customary ordinances and written laws to the law natural.  The law natural was announced to have preceded any law of human devising.  In the same way, those who wished to disperse the darkness of unintelligible dogmas and degraded ecclesiastical usages, appealed to the simplicity, light, and purity of that natural religion which was supposed to have been overlaid and depraved by the special superstitions of the different communities of the world.