next step was to procure a pastoral from the archbishop of Paris.  This document not only condemned the heretical propositions of De Prades, but referred in sombre terms to unnamed works teeming with error and impiety.  Every one understood the reference, and among its effects was an extension of the vogue and notoriety of the Encyclopaedia.[128] The Jesuits were not allowed to retain a monopoly of persecuting zeal, and the Jansenists refused to be left behind in the race of hypocritical intrigue.  The bishop of Auxerre, who belonged to this party, followed his brother prelate of Paris in a more direct attack, in which he included not only the Encyclopaedia, but Montesquieu and Buffon.  De Prades took to flight.  D’Alembert commended him to Voltaire, then at Berlin.  The king was absent, but Voltaire gave royal protection to the fugitive until Frederick’s return.  De Prades was then at once taken into favour and appointed reader to the king.  He proved but a poor martyr, however, for he afterwards retracted his heresies, got a benefice, and was put into prison by Frederick for giving information to his French countrymen during the Seven Years’ War.[129] Unfortunately neither orthodoxy nor heterodoxy has any exclusive patent for monopoly of rascals.

Meanwhile Diderot wrote on his behalf an energetic and dignified reply to the aggressive pastoral.  This apology is not such a masterpiece of eloquence as the magnificent letter addressed by Rousseau ten years later to the archbishop of Paris, after the pastoral against Emilius.  But Diderot’s vindication of De Prades is firm, moderate, and closely argumentative.  The piece is worth turning to in our own day, when great dignitaries of the churches too often show the same ignorance, the same temerity, and the same reckless want of charity, as the bishop of Auxerre showed a hundred and twenty years ago.  They resort to the very same fallacies by way of shield against scientific truths or philosophical speculations that happen not to be easily reconcilable with their official opinions.  “I know nothing so indecent,” says Diderot, “and nothing so injurious to religion as these vague declamations of theologians against reason.  One would suppose, to hear them, that men could only enter into the bosom of Christianity as a herd of cattle enter into a stable; and that we must renounce our common sense either to embrace our religion or to remain in it....  Such principles as yours are made to frighten small souls; everything alarms them, because they perceive clearly the consequences of nothing; they set up connections among things which have nothing to do with one another; they spy danger in any method of arguing which is strange to them; they float at hazard between truths and prejudices which they never distinguish, and to which they are equally attached; and all their life is passed in crying out either miracle or impiety.”  In an eloquent peroration, which is not more eloquent than it is instructive, De Prades is made to turn