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212 Later Theology visited by more than one hundred and fifty thousand people, gave dramatic underscoring to the ' ' Brotherhood of Religions " — the phrase in which they were welcomed by one of the authorities — and adopted as its motto the words from Malachi: "Have we not all one Father? hath not one God created us?" It was possible, of course, to take the ground — and it was at first widely taken — that these religions were so many evi- dences of the sinfulness of mankind. James S. Dennis, author of the three-volume work on Christian Missions and Social Progress (1898) — a mine of rare and accurate sociological material — holds: "They are the corruptions and perversion of a primitive, monotheistic faith, which was directly taught by God to the early progenitors of the race. . . . They are gross caricatures and fragmentary semblances of the true religion." W. C. Wilkinson of the University of Chicago, speaking at the Parliament of Religions, declared : ' ' The attitude of Christianity towards religions other than itself is an attitude of universal, absolute, eternal, unappeasable hostility, while toward all men its attitude is an attitude of grace, mercy, peace for whosoever will." And the noble and eloquent Bishop J. M. Thobum of India castigates the preposterous view that the great religions were all originated and developed by God Himself and that they all have been and still are serving their purpose in the education of the human race, and declares that he has "no more respect for Mohammedanism as a system than for Mormonism." As time went on, however, a wise agnosticism regarding the origin of the religions of the Eastern world came to be combined with an ever more intelligently founded conviction of the moral supremacy of Christianity. Arthiu: H. Smith, brilliant speaker and keen observer, has given a record of his twenty -two years of life in China in the popular books Chinese Characteristics (1894) ^^<^ Village Life in China (1899). He finds the Confucian classics to be "the best chart ever con- structed by man" and feels that "perhaps it is not too much to say that its authors may have had in some sense a divine guidance." He still insists, however, that the Chinese lack "character and conscience" and that they must have "a knowledge of God and a new conception of man ' ' to attain them. William N. Clarke, after a tour of the missions abroad, sums up thus :