Immediately after the promulgation of the Koran, which followed Muhammed’s death, it became necessary to fix the meaning and to determine the bearing of its text. There was one theme in which all agreed: the grandeur, majesty, and beneficence of one supreme Being, the Creator, ruler, and preserver of the world, which is the effulgence of his power. This is expressed in the Koran in such a strain of sublimity as may unite men of all religions in one feeling of admiration. This excellence is an inheritance of the most ancient Asiatic religion. God can but be always the object of boundless adoration, but never that of human reasoning. Hence the Muhammedan sects disagreed about the attributes of God. The residence assigned, although inconsistently with pure spiritualism, to the supreme Being was the ninth heaven; an eighth sphere formed the intermediate story between the uppermost heaven and seven other spheres, distributed among so many prophets, in the same manner as, in the Desátir, the seven prophet kings of the Péshdadian dynasty were joined to the seven planets which they, each one in particular, venerated. Numberless angels, among whom four principal chiefs, fill the universe, and serve, in a thousand different ways, the supreme Lord of creation. We recognisee the notions of the ancient Persian religion in this, and in the whole system of divine government. Another subject of violent and interminable dispute was God’s action upon the nether world, principally upon mankind, or God’s universal and eternal judgment, commonly called _predestination_. This subject was greatly agitated by the _Matezalas_, _Kadarians_, _Jabarians_, and others; they disputed “_Of providence, foreknowledge. will, and fate, Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost._” Although this subject appears to be connected with the Zoroastrian doctrine of the two principles, “good and bad,” yet it has never been agitated with so much violence in so many particular ways by any religionists as by the Muhammedans.