So much smoke tells of fire; but only in 1745 and 1746 did the printed Examen of De la Serre and the Pensées philosophiques of Diderot begin to build up in France the modern school of critical and philosophic deism. When in 1751 the Abbé Gauchat began his series of Lettres critiques, he set out by attacking Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, Diderot's Pensées philosophiques, the anonymous Discours sur la vie heureuse (1748), Les Moeurs [980] (1748), and Pope's Essay on Man; taking up in his second volume the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu (1721), and other sets of Lettres written in imitation of them. In the third volume he has nothing more aggressive of Voltaire's to deal with than La Henriade, the Mahomet, and some of his fugitive pieces. And the Bishop of Puy, writing in 1754 his La Dévotion conciliée avec l'esprit, could say to the faithful: "You live in an age fertile in pretended esprits forts, who, too weak nevertheless to attack in front an invincible religion, skirmish lightly around it, and in default of the reasons they lack, employ raillery." [981] The chivalrous bishop knew perfectly well that had a serious attack been published author and publisher would have been sent if possible to the Bastille, if not to the scaffold. But his evidence is explicit. There is here no recognition of any literary bombardment, though there was certainly an abundance of unbelief. [982] Buckle has probably mistaken the meaning of the summing up of some previous writer to the effect that up to 1750 or a few years later the political opposition to the Court was religious, in the sense of ecclesiastical or sectarian (Jansenist), [983] and that it afterwards turned to matters of public administration. [984] It would be truer to say that the early Lettres philosophiques, the reading of which later made the boy Lafayette a republican at nine, were a polemic for political and social freedom, and as such a more direct criticism of the French administrative system than Voltaire ever penned afterwards, save in the Voix du Sage et du Peuple (1750). In point of fact, as will be shown below, only some twenty scattered freethinking works had appeared in French up to 1745, almost none of them directly attacking Christian beliefs; and, despite the above-noted sallies of Voltaire, Condorcet comes to the general conclusion that it was the hardihood of Rousseau's deism in the "Confession of a Savoyard Vicar" in his Émile (1762) that spurred Voltaire to new activity. [985] This is perhaps not quite certain; there is some reason to believe that his "Sermon of the Fifty," his "first frontal attack on Christianity," [986] was written a year before; but in any case that and other productions of his at once left Rousseau far in the rear. Even now he had no fixed purpose of continuous warfare against so powerful and cruel an enemy as the Church, which in 1757 had actually procured an edict pronouncing the death penalty against all writers of works