In this we hear the voice of the new time, as we do in his exclamation that the perfection of an Encyclopaedia is the work of centuries; centuries had to elapse before the foundations could be laid; centuries would have to elapse before its completion:  “mais a la poserite, et A L’ETRE QUI NE MEURT POINT!"[127] These exalted ideas were not a substitute for arduous labour.  In all that Diderot writes upon his magnificent undertaking, we are struck by his singular union of common sense with elevation, of simplicity with grasp, of suppleness with strength, of modesty with hopeful confidence.  On occasions that would have tempted a man of less sincerity and less seriousness to bombast and inflation, his sense of the unavoidable imperfections of so vast a work always makes itself felt through his pride in its lofty aim and beneficent design.  The weight of the burden steadied him, and the anxiety of the honest and laborious craftsman mastered the impulses of rhetoric.

Before going further into the general contents of the Encyclopaedia, we shall briefly describe the extraordinary succession of obstacles and embarrassments against which its intrepid conductor was compelled to fight his way.  The project was fully conceived and its details worked out between 1745 and 1748.  The Encyclopedia was announced in 1750, in a Prospectus of which Diderot was the author.  At length in 1751 the first volume of the work itself was given to the public, followed by the second in January 1752.  The clerical party at once discerned what tremendous fortifications, with how deadly an armament, were rising up in face of their camp.  The Jesuits had always been jealous of an enterprise in which they had not been invited to take a part.  They had expected at least to have the control of the articles on theology.  They now were bent on taking the work into their own hands, and orthodoxy hastily set all the machinery of its ally, authority, in vigorous motion.

The first attack was indirect.  An abbe de Prades sustained a certain thesis in an official exercise at the Sorbonne, and Diderot was suspected, without good reason, of being its true author.  An examination of its propositions was ordered.  It was pronounced pernicious, dangerous, and tending to deism, chiefly on account of some too suggestive comparisons between the miraculous healings in the New Testament, and those ascribed in the more ancient legend to AEsculapius.  Other grounds of vehement objection were found in the writer’s maintenance of the Lockian theory of the origin of our ideas.  To deny the innateness of ideas was roundly asserted to be materialism and atheism.  The abbe de Prades was condemned, and deprived of his license (Jan 27, 1752).  As he was known to be a friend of Diderot, and was suspected of being the writer of articles on theology in the Encyclopaedia, the design of the Jesuit cabal in ruining De Prades was to discredit the new undertaking, and to induce the government to prohibit it.  Their