The clerical party at once discerned what tremendous fortifications, with how deadly an armament, were rising up in face of their camp.

The Jesuits had always been jealous of an enterprise in which they had not been invited to take a part.

They had expected at least to have the control of the articles on theology.

They now were bent on taking the work into their own hands, and orthodoxy hastily set all the machinery of its ally, authority, in vigorous motion.
The first attack was indirect.

An abbe de Prades sustained a certain thesis in an official exercise at the Sorbonne, and Diderot was suspected, without good reason, of being its true author.