clerical party at once discerned what
tremendous fortifications, with how deadly an armament, were rising up
in face of their camp. The Jesuits had always been jealous of an
enterprise in which they had not been invited to take a part. They had
expected at least to have the control of the articles on theology. They
now were bent on taking the work into their own hands, and orthodoxy
hastily set all the machinery of its ally, authority, in vigorous
motion.

The first attack was indirect. An abbe de Prades sustained a certain
thesis in an official exercise at the Sorbonne, and Diderot was
suspected, without good reason, of being its true author. An examination
of its propositions was ordered. It was pronounced pernicious,
dangerous, and tending to deism, chiefly on account of some too
suggestive comparisons between the miraculous healings in the New
Testament, and those ascribed in the more ancient legend to AEsculapius.
Other grounds of vehement objection were found in the writer's
maintenance of the Lockian theory of the origin of our ideas. To deny
the innateness of ideas was roundly asserted to be materialism and
atheism. The abbe de Prades was condemned, and deprived of his license
(Jan 27, 1752). As he was known to be a friend of Diderot, and was
suspected of being the writer of articles on theology in the
Encyclopaedia, the design of the Jesuit cabal in ruining De Prades was
to discredit the new undertaking, and to induce the government to
prohibit it. Their next step was to procure a pastoral from the
archbishop of Paris. This document not only condemned the heretical
propositions of De Prades, but referred in sombre terms to unnamed works
teeming with error and impiety. Every one understood the reference, and
among its effects was an extension of the vogue and notoriety of the
Encyclopaedia.[128] The Jesuits were not allowed to retain a monopoly of
persecuting zeal, and the Jansenists refused to be left behind in the
race of hypocritical intrigue. The bishop of Auxerre, who belonged to
this party, followed his brother prelate of Paris in a more direct
attack, in which he included not only the Encyclopaedia, but
Montesquieu and Buffon. De Prades took to flight. D'Alembert commended
him to Voltaire, then at Berlin. The king was absent, but Voltaire gave
royal protection to the fugitive until Frederick's return. De Prades was
then at once taken into favour and appointed reader to the king. He
proved but a poor mar