"In a Christian and philosophical sense, mankind seem to have stood still at individual civilization, and to retain as nations all the original rudeness of nature.... As individuals we profess ourselves Christians, but as nations we are heathens, Romans, and what not. I remember the late Admiral Saunders declaring in the House of Commons, and that in the time of peace, 'That the city of Madrid laid in ashes was not a sufficient atonement for the Spaniards taking off the rudder of an English sloop of war.'... The arm of Britain has been spoken of as the arm of the Almighty, and she has lived of late as if she thought the whole world created for her diversion. Her politics, instead of civilizing, has tended to brutalize mankind, and under the vain unmeaning title of 'Defender of the Faith,' she has made war like an Indian on the Religion of Humanity."' Thus, forty years before Auguste Comte sat, a youth of twenty, at the feet of Saint Simon, learning the principles now known as "The Religion of Humanity,"* Thomas Paine had not only minted the name, but with it the idea of international civilization, in which nations are to treat each other as gentlemen in private life. National honor was, he said, confused with "bullying"; but "that which is the best character for an individual is the best character for a nation." The great and pregnant idea was, as in the previous instances, occasional. It was a sentence passed upon the "Defender-of-the-Faith" superstition, which detached faith from humanity, and had pressed the Indian's tomahawk into the hands of Jesus. * Mr. Thaddeus B. Wakeman, an eminent representative of the "Religion of Humanity," writes me that he has not found this phrase in any work earlier than Paine's _Crisis_, vii.