The main obstacle that prevents the formation of Comparative Religion as a science is the difference between one religious structure and another. For example, one can never really compare Christianity adequately with Hinduism or Buddhism. For one thing, the Hindu scriptures do assimilate, in an integral entity, both aspects of a speculative tradition, known in the terminology of the Western intellectual traditions as theology and philosophy. With very few exceptions -- for example, Malebranche -- the West does not evince a sustained, integrated thought or speculative enterprise that unifies philosophy and theology. Philosophy has developed out of principles sought out and established by Reason, while the concerns of Theology drew their sustenance and their meaning from the need to reconcile History with the demands of Faith in revealed Truth. Consequently, while Theology has had a spectacular career and has, for nearly a thousand years, affected the course and form of the history of the West, especially during the Middle Ages under the aegis of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire and later in Protestant theology following the Lutheran schism, it cannot be denied that Philosophy, too, has had a decisive, often divergent, impact on the destiny of the Western Man.