the secrets of humanity and life.  For his hour, however, the need was not knowledge of the thoughts, dreams, and mental methods of the past, but better mastery of the aids and instruments of active life.  In any case Diderot was right when he expressed his preference for the essay over the treatise:  “an essay where the writer throws me one or two ideas of genius, almost isolated, rather than a treatise where the precious gems are stifled beneath a mass of iteration....  A man had only one idea; the idea demanded no more than a phrase; this phrase, full of marrow and meaning, would have been seized with relish; washed out in a deluge of words, it wearies and disgusts."[169] Rousseau himself does not surpass Diderot or D’Alembert in contempt for mere bookishness.  We wholly misjudge the Encyclopaedia, if we treat it either as literature or philosophy.

The attitude of the Encyclopaedia to religion is almost universally misrepresented in the common accounts.  We are always told that the aim of its conductors was to preach dogmatic atheism.  Such a statement could not be made by any one who had read the theological articles, whether the more or the less important among them.  Whether Diderot had himself advanced definitely to the dogma of atheism at this time or not, it is certain that the Encyclopaedia represents only the phase of rationalistic scepticism.  That the criticism was destructive of much of the fabric of popular belief, and was designed to destroy it, is undeniable, as it was inevitable.  But when the excesses of ’93 and ’94—­and all the revolutionary excesses put together are but a drop compared with the oceans of bloodshed with which Catholicism and absolutism have made history crimson—­when the crimes and confusion of the end of the century are traced by historians to the materialism and atheism of the Encyclopaedia, we can only say that such an account is a misrepresentation.  The materialism and atheism are not there.  The religious attack was prompted and guided by the same social feeling that inspired the economic articles.  The priest was the enemy of society, the patron of indolence, the hater of knowledge, the mutineer against the civil laws, the unprofitable devourer of the national substance, the persecutor.  Sacerdotalism is the object of the encyclopaedic attack.  To undermine this, it was necessary first to establish the principle of toleration, because the priest claims to be recognised as the exclusive possessor of saving doctrine.  Second, it was necessary to destroy the principle of miracle, because the priest professes himself in his daily rites the consecrated instrument of thaumaturgy.  “Let a man,” says Rosenkranz very truly, “turn over hundreds of histories of church, of state, of literature, and in every one of them he will read that the Encyclopaedia spread abroad an irreligious spirit.  The accusation has only a relative truth, to the extent that the Encyclopaedia assailed the belief in miracles, and the oppression of conscience supported by a priestly aristocracy."[170]