pass their lives in furious disputes upon unintelligible points; that they brought no indecent and persecuting accusation against one another before the civil magistrate.  There was gall and wormwood to the orthodox bigot in the harmless statement that “Hell, which is one of the principal articles of our belief, has ceased to be one with many of the ministers of Geneva; it would be, according to them, a great insult to the divinity, to imagine that this Being, so full of justice and goodness, is capable of punishing our faults by an eternity of torment:  they explain in as good a sense as they can the formal passages of Scripture which are contrary to their opinion, declaring that we ought never in the sacred books to take anything literally, that seems to wound humanity and reason.”  And we may be sure that D’Alembert was thinking less of the consistory and the great council of Geneva, than of the priests and the parliament of Paris, when he praised the Protestant pastors, not only for their tolerance, but for confining themselves within their proper functions, and for being the first to set an example of submission to the magistrates and the laws.  The intention of this elaborate and, reasoned account of the creed and practice of a handful of preachers in a heretical town, could not be mistaken by those at whom it was directed.  It produced in the black ranks of official orthodoxy fully as angry a shock as its writer could have designed.

The church had not yet, we must remember, borrowed the principles of humanity and tolerance from atheists.  It was not the comparatively purified Christian doctrine of our own time with which the Encyclopaedists did battle, but an organised corporation, with exceptional tribunals, with special material privileges, with dungeons and chains at their disposal.  We have to realise that official religion was then a strange union of Byzantine decrepitude, with the energetic ferocity of the Holy Office.  Within five years of this indirect plea of D’Alembert for tolerance and humanity, Calas was murdered by the orthodoxy of Toulouse.  Nearly ten years later (1766), we find Lewis XV., with the steam of the Parc aux Cerfs about him, rewarded by the loyal acclamations of a Parisian crowd, for descending from his carriage as a priest passed bearing the sacrament, and prostrating himself in the mud before the holy symbol.[138] In the same year the youth La Barre was first tortured, then beheaded, then burnt, for some presumed disrespect to the same holy symbol—­then become the hateful ensign of human degradation, of fanatical cruelty, of rancorous superstition.  Yet I should be sorry to be unjust.  It is to be said that even in these bad days when religion meant cruelty and cabal, the one or two men who boldly withstood to the face the king and the Pompadour for the vileness of their lives, were priests of the church.