f the great work on account of the anti-Christian
tendencies these same articles displayed.[418]

Now for a further light on the matter.

In the famous speech of the Chevalier Ramsay already quoted, which was
delivered at Grand Lodge of Paris in 1737, the following passage occurs:

The fourth quality required in our Order is the taste for useful
sciences and the liberal arts. Thus, the Order exacts of each of
you to contribute, by his protection, liberality, or labour, to a
vast work for which no academy can suffice, because all these
societies being composed of a very small number of men, their work
cannot embrace an object so extended. All the Grand Masters in
Germany, England, Italy, and elsewhere exhort all the learned men
and all the artisans of the Fraternity to unite to furnish the
materials for a Universal Dictionary of all the liberal arts and
useful sciences; excepting only theology and politics. The work has
already been commenced in London, and by means of the unions of our
brothers it may be carried to a conclusion in a few years.[419]

So after all it was no enterprising bookseller, no brilliantly inspired
philosopher, who conceived the idea of the _Encyclopedie_, but a
powerful international organization able to employ the services of more
men than all the academies could supply, which devised the scheme at
least six years before the date at which it is said to have occurred to
Diderot. Thus the whole story as usually told to us would appear to be a
complete fabrication--struggling publishers, toiling _litterateurs_
carrying out their superhuman task as "independent men of letters"
without the patronage of the great--which Lord Morley points out as "one
of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopaedia"--writers
of all kinds bound together by no "common understanding or agreement,"
are all seen in reality to have been closely associated as "artisans of
the Fraternity" carrying out the orders of their superiors.

The _Encyclopedie_ was therefore essentially a Masonic publication, and
Papus, whilst erroneously attributing the famous oration and
consequently the plan of the _Encyclopedie_ to the inspiration of the
Duc d'Antin, emphasizes the importance of this fact. Thus, he writes:

The Revolution manifests itself by two stages:

1st. _Intellectual revolution_, by the publication of the
_Encyclopedie_, due to Fren