"Memoirs of Frederick Perthes, or, Literary, religious, and political life in Germany, from 1789 to 1843" était une oeuvre littéraire de Clement Theodore Perthes au 19ème siècle. (Réalité extrapolée *)
Lors de son voyage vers la base stellaire 515 en 2365, Jean-Luc Picard a lu le volume 2 de cet œuvre. (TNG: "Samaritan Snare")
La page 226 lue par Picard peut être visible ici :
to Protestants. Or is proselytism the bugbear that frightens you ? That truly would be a mountain bringing forth a mouse !’' Perthes received in answer: — “ What do the Jesuits want ? Pirst and before all, they want to rule over the minds and property of men. That is little, and yet everything. Their great strength lies, not in gaining this or that particular ad- vantage, but in sailing with every wind. Enemies to freedom of thought, speech, and action, they influence courts through the most varied mediums, filling princes with distrust and fear, now driving them to measures of violent compression, now putting into their mouths soft words and fair speeches, and always with infinite tact turning to profit the business of the hour. It is not their spiritual but their temporal power that I dread. I do not, indeed, envy them their spiritual virtues, but I envy them this, that they hold together and work as one man." In January 1826, Niebuhr wrote to Perthes : — You say you stand to Catholicism as east to north. This was only right during the low estate of Catholicism, when diversity of views was alone in question. Now, however, everything bad has been revived, the whole priestly system, with its gigantic schemes of conquest and subjugation ; nor can it he doubted that religious wars themselves are contemplated and in prepa- ration. We must therefore take good care not to become the tools of these people. I bless God that Stolberg was taken away in time, for he would have yielded to their craft. Who- ever lives in a Catholic district of Germany, as I do, must ob- serve that scholars and laymen generally are exactly like our- selves, hut that a curse of stupidity or baseness, or of both, rests on the clergy, and that the converters and champions of the Church-militant are the devil's own."