ht us no new truth;
for what is a truth but a proposition referring to an object, conceived
in terms which present clear ideas to me, and the connection of which
with one another is intelligible to me? Now revealed religion has
introduced no such propositions to us. What it has added to the natural
law consists of five or six propositions which are not a whit more
intelligible to me than if they were expressed in ancient Carthaginian,
inasmuch as the ideas represented by the terms, and the connection among
these ideas, escape me entirely."[38]

There is no sign in this piece that Diderot had examined the positive
grounds of natural religion, or that he was ready with any adequate
answer to the argument which Butler had brought forward in the previous
decade of the century. We do not see that he is aware as yet of there
being as valid objections on his own sceptical principles to the alleged
data of naturalistic deism, as to the pretensions of a supernatural
religion. He was content with Shaftesbury's position.

Shaftesbury's influence on Diderot was permanent. It did not long remain
so full and entire as it was now in the sphere of religious belief, but
the traces of it never disappeared from his notions on morals and art.
Shaftesbury's cheerfulness and geniality in philosophising were
thoroughly sympathetic to Diderot. The optimistic harmony which the
English philosopher, coming after Leibnitz, assumed as the
starting-point of his ethical and religious ideas, was not only highly
congenial to Diderot's sanguine temperament; it was a most attractive
way of escape from the disorderly and confused theological wilderness of
sin, asceticism, miracle, and the other monkeries. This naturalistic
religion may seem a very unsafe and comfortless halting-place to us. But
to men who heard of religion only in connection with the Bull Unigenitus
and confessional certificates, with some act of intolerance or cruelty,
with futile disputes about grace and the Five Propositions, the
naturalism which Shaftesbury taught in prose and Pope versified was like
the dawn after the foulness of night. Those who wished to soften the
inhuman rigour of the criminal procedure of the time[39] used to appeal
from customary ordinances and written laws to the law natural. The law
natural was announced to have preceded any law of human devising. In the
same way, those who wished to disperse the darkness of unintelligible
dogmas and degraded ecclesiastical