round on his Jansenist censor, and reproach him with the disturbance with which the intestine rivalries of Jansenist and Jesuit had afflicted the faithful.  “It is the abominable testimony of your convulsions,” he cries, “that has overthrown the testimony of miracles.  It is the fatuous audacity with which your fanatics have confronted persecution, that has annihilated the evidence of the martyrs.  It is your declamations against sovereign pontiffs, against bishops, against all the orders of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that have covered priest, altar, and creed with opprobrium.  If the pope, the bishops, the priests, the simple faithful, the whole church, if its mysteries, its sacraments, its temples, its ceremonies, have fallen into contempt, yours, yours, is the handiwork."[130]

Bourdaloue more than half a century before had taunted the free-thinkers of his day with falseness and inconsistency in taking sides with the Jansenists, whose superstitions they notoriously held in open contempt.  The motive for the alliance was tolerably obvious.  The Jansenists, apart from their theology, were above all else the representatives of opposition to authority.  It was for this that Lewis XIV. counted them worse than atheists.  The Jesuits, it has been well said in keeping down their enemies by force, became the partisans of absolute government, and upheld it on every occasion.  The Jansenists, after they had been crushed by violence, began to feel to what excesses power might be brought.  From being speculative enemies to freedom as a theory, they became, through the education of persecution, the partisans of freedom in practice.  The quarrel of Molinists and Jansenists, from a question of theology, grew into a question of human liberty.[131]

Circumstances had now changed.  The free-thinkers were becoming strong enough to represent opposition to authority on their own principles and in their own persons.  Diderot’s vigorous remonstrance with the bishop of Auxerre incidentally marks for us the definite rupture of philosophic sympathy for the Jansenist champions.  “It is your disputatiousness,” he said, “which within the last forty years has made far more unbelievers than all the productions of philosophy.”  As we cannot too clearly realise, it was the flagrant social incompetence of the church which brought what they called Philosophy, that is to say Liberalism, into vogue and power.  Locke’s Essay had been translated in 1700, but it had made no mark, and as late as 1725 the first edition of the translation remained unsold.  It was the weakness and unsightly decrepitude of the ecclesiastics which opened the way for the thinkers.

This victory, however, was not yet.  Diderot had still a dismal wilderness to traverse.  He was not without secret friends even in the camp of his enemies.