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.

D'Alembert's article hardly goes beyond what to us seem the axioms of
all men of sense. We must remember the time. Even members of the
philosophic party itself, like Grimm, thought the article misplaced and
hardy.[139] The Genevese ministers indignantly repudiated the compliment
of Socinianism, and the eulogy of being rather less irrational than
their neighbours. Voltaire read and read again with delight, and plied
the writer with reiterated exhortations in every key, not to allow
himself to be driven from the great work by the raging of the heathen
and the vain imaginings of the people.[140]

While the storm seemed to be at its height, an incident occurred which
let loose a new flood of violent passion. Helvetius published that
memorable book in which he was thought to have told all the world its
own secret. His _De l'Esprit_ came out in 1758.[141] It provoked a
general insurrection of public opinion. The devout and the heedless
agreed in denouncing it as scandalous, licentious, impious, and pregnant
with peril. The philosophic party felt that their al