them?...  After having been the stormy and painful occupation of the most precious years of our life, this work will perhaps be the solace of its close.  May it, when both we and our enemies alike have ceased to exist, be a durable monument of the good intention of the one, and the injustice of the other....  Let us remember the fable of Bocalina:  ’A traveller was disturbed by the importunate chirrupings of the grasshoppers; he would fain have slain them every one, but only got belated and missed his way; he need only have fared peacefully on his road, and the grasshoppers would have died of themselves before the end of a week.’"[136] A volume was now produced in each year, until the autumn of 1757 and the issue of the seventh volume.  This brought the work down to Gyromancy and Gythiuin.  Then there arose storms and divisions which marked a memorable epoch alike in the history of the book, in the life of Diderot and others, and in the thought of the century.  The progress of the work in popularity during the five years between 1752 and 1757 had been steady and unbroken.  The original subscribers were barely two thousand.  When the fourth volume appeared, there were three thousand.  The seventh volume found nearly a thousand more.[137] Such prodigious success wrought the chagrin of the party of superstition to fever heat.  As each annual volume came from the press and found a wider circle of readers than its predecessor, their malice and irritation waxed a degree more intense.  They scattered malignant rumours abroad; they showered pamphlets; no imputation was too odious or too ridiculous for them.  Diderot, D’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, Buffon, were declared to have organised a league of writers, with the deliberate purpose of attacking the public tranquillity and overthrowing society.  They were denounced as heads of a formal conspiracy, a clandestine association, a midnight band, united in a horrible community of pestilent opinions and sombre interests.

In the seventh volume an article appeared which made the ferment angrier than it had ever been.  D’Alembert had lately been the guest of Voltaire at Ferney, whence he had made frequent visits to Geneva.  In his intercourse with the ministers of that famous city, he came to the conclusion that their religious opinions were really Socinian, and when he wrote the article on Geneva he stated this.  He stated it in such a way as to make their heterodox opinions a credit to Genevese pastors, because he associated disbelief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, in mysteries of faith, and in eternal punishment, with a practical life of admirable simplicity, purity, and tolerance.  Each line of this eulogy on the Socinian preachers of Geneva, veiled a burning and contemptuous reproach against the cruel and darkened spirit of the churchmen in France.  Jesuit and Jansenist, loose abbes and debauched prelates, felt the quivering of the arrow in the quick, as they read that the morals of the Genevese pastors were exemplary; that they did not