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From that day, however, much as he hated General Bonaparte, the Abbe Sergi received no more letters from Paradise.
One day, Marmont announced that a certain Abbe Sergi was exciting the peasants against the French, and especially against Bonaparte; that he was preaching sedition and rebellion in Christ's name, and was showing to the ignorant laborers a letter, which he had received from Christ, in which it was declared that General Bonaparte was an atheist and a heretic, whom one ought to destroy and drive away from Italy's sacred soil.
It is lying before me now on my table, and my eyes rest dreamily on its helmeted head of Pallas Nicephora. There, behind her, is the mint-mark and that word of ancient power and glory, "Roma." Below are letters so worn and indistinct that I must bend close to read them: " M. SERGI," and then others that I cannot trace.
It is because socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs, whether one regards them, with Sergi, as pathological phenomena of human psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary scientific culture.
Bonaparte at once ordered Marmont to arrest this Abbe Sergi, who lived in Poncino, and to bring him to Montebello. His orders were followed, and, after a few days, the captive abbe was brought before the general. He seemed cheerful, unaffected, and assumed the appearance of being unconscious of guilt. "Are you the man," exclaimed Bonaparte, "to whom Christ writes letters from Paradise?"
Despite much effort on the part of students, it has been impossible to show any Asiatic origin for the Egyptian language. As Sergi maintains, "everything favors an African origin." The most brilliant suggestion of modern days links together the Egyptian of North Africa and the Hottentot and Bushmen tongues of South Africa.
Nevertheless, the letters of the Abbe Sergi were not those which gave the most solicitude to Bonaparte; much worse were those he received from Paris, which gave him an account of the persevering intrigues of his enemies, and the malicious slanders that were circulated against him by the Directory, who were envious of his power and superiority, and which mischievous and poisonous calumnies were re-echoed in the newspapers.
Professor Müller and his contemporaries used to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence.
VADALA, Darwinismo naturale e Darwinismo sociale, Turin, 1883. BORDIER, La vie des sociétés, Paris, 1887. SERGI, Le degenerazione umane, Milan, 1889, p. 158. BEBEL, Woman in the past, present and future. MAX NORDAU, Conventional Lies of our Civilization.
NITTI, Le Socialisme catholique, Paris, 1894, p. 27 and 393. Its usual form in America. Translator. Nuova Rassegna, August, 1894. SERGI, L'origine dei fenomeni psichici e loro significazione biologica, Milan, 1885, p. 334, et seq. DURKHEIM, De la division du travail social. Paris. 1893.
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