ct of Nantes, and whose paroxysms of religious hysteria at
length brought them into trouble with the authorities (1707). Paris saw
an outbreak of the same kind of ecstasy, though on a much more
formidable scale, among the Jansenist fanatics, from 1727 down to 1758,
or later. Some of the best attested miracles in the whole history of the
supernatural were wrought at the tomb of the Jansenist deacon,
Paris.[30] The works of faith exalted multitudes into convulsive
transports; men and women underwent the most cruel tortures, in the hope
of securing a descent upon them of the divine grace. The sober citizen,
whose journal is so useful a guide to domestic events in France from the
Regency to the Peace of 1763, tells us the effect of this hideous
revival upon public sentiment. People began to see, he says, what they
were to think of the miracles of antiquity. The more they went into
these matters, whether miracles or prophecies, the more obscurity they
discovered in the one, the more doubt about the other. Who could tell
that they had not been accredited and established in remote times with
as little foundation as what was then passing under men's very eyes?
Just in the same way, the violent and prolonged debates, the intrigue,
the tergiversation, which attended the acceptance of the famous Bull
Unigenitus, taught shrewd observers how it is that religions establish
themselves. They also taught how little respect is due in our minds and
consciences to the great points which the universal church claims to
have decided.[31]

These are the circumstances which explain the rude and vigorous
scepticism of Diderot's first performances. And they explain the
influence of Shaftesbury over him. Neither Diderot nor his
contemporaries were ready at once to plunge into the broader and firmer
negation to which they afterwards committed themselves. No doubt some of
the politeness which he shows to Christianity, both in the notes to his
translation of Shaftesbury, and in his own Philosophic Thoughts, is no
more than an ironical deference to established prejudices. The notes to
the Essay on Merit and Virtue show that Diderot, like all the other
French revolters against established prejudice, had been deeply
influenced by the shrewd-witted Montaigne. But the ardour of the
disciple pressed objections home with a trenchancy that is very unlike
the sage distillations of the master. It was from Shaftesbury, however,
that he borrowed common sense as