disgusted and wearied the more enlightened spirits, and the English
philosophy only held out an inspiring intellectual alternative.[29]

Nor was it accident that drew Diderot's attention to Shaftesbury, rather
than to any other of our writers. That author's essay on Enthusiasm had
been suggested by the extravagances of the French prophets, poor
fanatics from the Cevennes, who had fled to London after the revocation
of the edict 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]