On the other hand, the atheist is left in the midst of a catastrophe.

On his return home, he finds his children murdered, his house pillaged, and his wife carried off.

And we are told that he could not complain on his own principles.
If the absence of witnesses allowed the robber to commit his crime with impunity, why should he not?
Again, there is a passage in which the writer seems to be speaking his own opinions.

An interlocutor maintains the importance of keeping the people in bondage to certain prejudices.
"What prejudices?
If a man once admits the existence of a God, the reality of moral good and evil, the immortality of the soul, future rewards and punishments, what need has he of prejudices?
Supposing him initiated in all the mysteries of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, the Trinity, hypostatical union, predestination, incarnation, and the rest, will he be any the better citizen ?"[51] In truth, Diderot's mind was at this time floating in an atmosphere of rationalistic negation, and the moral of his piece, as he hints, points first to the extravagance of Catholicism, next to the vanity of the pleasures of the world, and lastly, to the unfathomable uncertainty of philosophy.

Still, we may discern a significant leaning towards the theory of the eternity of matter, which has arranged itself and assumed variety of form by virtue of its inherent quality of motion.[52] It is a characteristic and displeasing mark of the time that Diderot in the midst of these serious speculations, should have set himself (1748) to the composition of a story in the kind which the author of the _Sofa_ had made highly popular.