If less burning, the problem of the relations of dogmatics to philosophy is perhaps more difficult to solve than the problem just discussed. It has given rise to quite as many controversies. The danger is twofold. On the one hand, there is the pretension of scholasticism, the attempt to absorb philosophy in theology and make it subservient. It is still the pretension of a certain simple Protestant orthodoxy, for which there is no philosophy outside the Christian faith. At the other extreme is the attempt of rationalism to include the Christian religion in general ethics and philosophy. In the first case it is dogmatics which absorbs philosophy; in the second it is philosophy which absorbs dogmatics. But, in both cases, the specifically religious phenomena are lost sight of, the original character of Christian piety is misconceived, and theology, no longer having any special domain, succumbs and vanishes. It is the merit of the Reformation of Luther, in the sixteenth, and of the thought of Schleiermacher and Vinet in the nineteenth century, to have brought out and rendered manifest, among all other psychological phenomena, the character _sui generis_ of Christian faith and life, and thus to have assigned to theology an object of study, eminent no doubt, but very special and very circumscribed. A task was thus marked out for theology widely different from that of philosophy--a task which consists, not in explaining everything in heaven and earth, but, more modestly and usefully, in giving an account of the religious experience of the Christian Church. Saved at once from scholasticism and rationalism, dogmatic theology may therefore build itself up in its own domain by the side of the other sciences without menacing or fearing any of them. Its relations to philosophy will become clear if we call to mind a very simple distinction. Philosophy to-day comprises two parts very different in nature: a study of the thinking subject, or, as it is sometimes called, a critique of reason, or a theory of knowledge; in the second place, a doctrine on the essence and the necessary relations of beings, a metaphysic, or a theory of the universe.