Secular knowledge was made to present a massive and sumptuous front.

It was pictured before the curious eyes of that generation as a great city of glittering palaces and stately mansions; or else as an immense landscape, with mountains, plains, rocks, waters, forests, animals, and a thousand objects, glorious and beautiful in the sunlight.

Theology became visibly a shrivelled thing.

Men grew to be conscious of the vastness of the universe.

At the same time and by the same process the Encyclopaedia gave them a key to the plan, a guiding thread in the immense labyrinth.