Hitler's Table Talk

THE FATE OF CHRISTIANITY 59
if these advantages were to last three hundred, five hundred
years or more. I'm convinced that any pact with the Church
can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the
scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a
compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a
foundation that one day will collapse.
An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature
and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the
other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a
return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that
the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in
the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything
on pure science.
That's why I've always kept the Party aloof from religious
questions. I've thus prevented my Catholic and Protestant
supporters from forming groups against one another, and inadvertently
knocking each other out with the Bible and the
sprinkler. So we never became involved with these Churches'
forms of worship. And if that has momentarily made my task
a little more difficult, at least I've never run the risk of carrying
grist to my opponents' mill. The help we would have
provisionally obtained from a concordat would have quickly
become a burden on us. In any case, the main thing is to be
clever in this matter and not to look for a struggle where it can
be avoided.
Being weighed down by a superstitious past, men are afraid
of things that can't, or can't yet, be explained—that is to say,
of the unknown. If anyone has needs of a metaphysical nature,
I can't satisfy them with the Party's programme. Time will go
by until the moment when science can answer all the questions.
So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle
with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a
natural death. A slow death has something comforting about
it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the
advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more
concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is
to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic
and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has
become widespread, when the majority of men know that the