There is a further point which Mr Baring Gould must settle. Religion may be theoretically regarded as an affair of growth, progressive, or as an affair of revelation, or something so nearly counterfeiting revelation as to arise spontaneously; but it cannot well be both. Now, in the pages of Mr Baring Gould it appears at one time "springing into life" (p. 109), and, as in the passage above, analogously to a conception in the mind:--"_At first_ it is full of vigour, constantly on the alert to win converts;" at another, "as a conception slowly evolved;" then all at once "a living belief, vividly luminous" (p. 109). Again (p. 110), "Religion does not reach perfection of development at a bound; generations pass away, before," &c.; and (p. 329) we find that in all _primitive_ religions the idea of God is the idea of a _devil_, or (_id._) "that the first stage in the conception of a devil is the attribution of evil to God," which is different, inasmuch as it supposes man to start with the knowledge of God, and is, moreover, inconsistent with what is said at page 113:--"The shapeless religion of a primitive people gradually assumes a definite form. It is that of _nature_ worship. It progresses through polytheism and idolatry, and emerges into monotheism or pantheism." Of course this is said upon _the assumption_ that the primitive man was barbarous. But however remote from the fact, it is theoretically as conceivable that man should worship nature as an ideal of beauty and power, as that he should regard it from the first as an apparition of terror; or, in other words, that taking nature-worship for granted, Mr Max Müller's view of it, viz.:--"He begins to lift up his eyes, he stares at the tent of heaven, and asks who supports it? He opens his eyes to the winds, and asks them whence and whither? He is awakened from darkness and slumber by the light of the sun, and Him whom his eyes cannot behold, and who seems to grant him the daily pittance of his existence, he calls 'his life, his breath, his brilliant Lord and Protector'" (Chips, i. 69, _apud_ B. G., 139),--is as likely to be the true one as Mr Baring Gould's,[120] viz.:--"At first man is ... antitheist; but presently he feels resistances.... The convulsions of nature, the storm, the thunder, the exploding volcano, the raging seas, fill him with a sense of there being a power superior to his own, before which he must bow. His religious thought, vague and undetermined, is roused by the opposition of nature to his will" (p. 137). [120] _Vide_, however, Dr Newman's "Grammar of Assent," p. 386, _et seq._