No one will ask whether the keen eye, and stimulating word, and helpful hand of Voltaire were wanting to an enterprise which was to awaken men to new love of tolerance, enlightenment, charity, and justice.  Voltaire was playing the refractory courtier at Potsdam when the first two volumes appeared.  With characteristic vehemence, he instantly pronounced it a work which should be the glory of France, and the shame of its persecutors.  Diderot and D’Alembert were raising an immortal edifice, and he would gladly furnish them with a little stone here or there, which they might find convenient to stuff into some corner or crevice in the wall.  He was incessant in his industry.  Unlike those feebler and more consequential spirits, the petits-maitres of thought, by whom editors are harassed and hindered, this great writer was as willing to undertake small subjects as large ones, and to submit to all the mutilations and modifications which the exigencies of the work and the difficulties of its conductors recommended to them.[118] As the structure progresses, his enthusiasm waxes warmer.  Diderot and his colleague are cutting their wings for a flight to posterity.  They are Atlas and Hercules bearing a world upon their shoulders.  It is the greatest work in the world; it is a superb pyramid; its printing-office is the office for the instruction of the human race; and so forth, in every phrase of stimulating sympathy and energetic interest.  Nor does his sympathy blind him to faults of execution.  Voltaire’s good sense and sound judgment were as much at the service of his friends in warning them of shortcomings, as in eulogising what they achieved.  And he had good faith enough to complain to his friends, instead of complaining of them.  In one place he tells them, what is perfectly true, that their journeymen are far too declamatory, and too much addicted to substitute vague and puerile dissertations for that solid instruction which is what the reader of an Encyclopaedia seeks.  In another he remonstrates against certain frivolous affectations, and some of the coxcombries of literary modishness.  Everywhere he recommends them to insist on a firm and distinct method in their contributors—­etymologies, definitions, examples, reasons, clearness, brevity.  “You are badly seconded,” he writes; “there are bad soldiers in the army of a great general."[119] “I am sorry to see that the writer of the article Hell declares that hell was a point in the doctrine of Moses; now by all the devils that is not true.  Why lie about it?  Hell is an excellent thing, to be sure, but it is evident that Moses did not know it.  ’Tis this world that is hell."[120]