Note 183 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

But Diderot was not the kind of man to be silenced by menaces. In the famous Sorbonne thesis of the Abbé de Prades (1751) he probably had, as we have seen, some share; and when De Prades was condemned and deprived of his licence (1752) Diderot wrote the third part of the Apologie (published by De Prades in Holland), which defended his positions; and possibly assisted in the other parts.183 The hand of Diderot perhaps may be discovered in the skilful allusions to the skeptical Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, which De Prades professes to have translated when at his seminary, seeking there the antidote to the poison of the deists. The entire handling of the question of pagan and Christian miracles, too, suggests the skilled dialectician, though it is substantially an adaptation of Leslie’s Short and Easy Method with the Deists. The alternate eulogy and criticism of Locke are likely to be his, as is indeed the abundant knowledge of English thought shown alike in the thesis and in the Apologie. Whether he wrote the passage which claims to rebut an argument in his own Pensées philosophiques184 is surely doubtful. But his, certainly, is the further reply to the pastoral of the Jansenist Bishop of Auxerre against de Prades’s thesis, in which the perpetual disparagement of reason by Catholic theologians is denounced185 as the most injurious of all procedures against religion. And his, probably, is the peroration186 arraigning the Jansenists and imputing to their fanaticism and superstition, their miracle-mongering and their sectarian bitterness, the discredit which among thinking men had latterly fallen upon Church and creed alike.187