The making of the _Encyclopédie_, which even those writers the most sceptical with regard to secret influences behind the revolutionary movement admit to have contributed towards the final cataclysm, is a question on which official history has thrown but little light. According to the authorized version of the story--as related, for example, in Lord Morley's work on the Encyclopædists--the plan of translating Ephraim Chambers's _Cyclopædia_, which had appeared in 1728, was suggested to Diderot "some fifteen years later" by a French bookseller named Le Breton. Diderot's "fertile and energetic intelligence transformed the scheme.... It was resolved to make Chambers's work a mere starting-point for a new enterprise of far wider scope." We then go on to read of the financial difficulties that now beset the publisher, of the embarrassment of Diderot, who "felt himself unequal to the task of arranging and supervising every department of a new book that was to include the whole circle of the sciences," of the fortunate enlisting of d'Alembert as a collaborator, and later of men belonging to all kinds of professions, "all united in a work that was as useful as it was laborious, without any view of interest ... without any common understanding and agreement," further, of the cruel persecutions encountered at the hands of the Jesuits, "who had expected at least to have control of the articles on theology," and finally of the tyrannical suppression of the great work on account of the anti-Christian tendencies these same articles displayed.[418] Now for a further light on the matter. In the famous speech of the Chevalier Ramsay already quoted, which was delivered at Grand Lodge of Paris in 1737, the following passage occurs: The fourth quality required in our Order is the taste for useful sciences and the liberal arts. Thus, the Order exacts of each of you to contribute, by his protection, liberality, or labour, to a vast work for which no academy can suffice, because all these societies being composed of a very small number of men, their work cannot embrace an object so extended. All the Grand Masters in Germany, England, Italy, and elsewhere exhort all the learned men and all the artisans of the Fraternity to unite to furnish the materials for a Universal Dictionary of all the liberal arts and useful sciences; excepting only theology and politics. The work has already been commenced in London, and by means of the unions of our brothers it may be carried to a conclusion in a few years.[419]