absolute predestination, holding that GOD was not the author of evil, but of good only; and that man was a free agent:8 which being properly the opinion of the Kadarians, we defer what may be farther said thereof till we come to speak of that sect. On account of this tenet and the first, the Móta- 3 Idem, and Auctor Sharh al Mawâkef, ubi sup. 4 Idem, ibid. p. 211, 212, and Ebu Khalecân, in Vita Waseli. 5 Al Shahrestani, who also reduces them to four chief sects, puts the Kadarians in the place of the Mótazalites. Abulfaragius (Hist. Dyn. p. 166) reckons six principal sects, adding the Jabarians and the Morgians; and the author of Sharh al Mawâkef eight, viz., the Mótazalites, the Shiites, the Khârejites, the Morgians, the Najarians, the Jabarians, the Moshabbehites, and the sect which he calls al Nâjia, because that alone will be saved, being according to him the sect of the Asharians. Vide Poc. Spec. p. 209. 1 Maimonides teaches the same, not as the doctrine of the Mótazalites, but his own. Vide More Nev. l. I, c. 57. 2 Al Shahrestani, apud Poc. Spec. p. 214. Abulfarag, p. 167. 3 Vide Poc. Spec. 224. 4 Sharh al Mawâkef, and al Shahrest. apud Poc. p. 216. Maimonides (in Proleg ad Pirke Aboth. § 8) asserts the same thing. 5 Vide Poc. ibid. 6 Al Shahrest. ibid. p. 215. 7 Abulfarag, and al Shahrest. ubi sup. p. 217. See before, Sect. III, p. 112 8 Vide Poc. Spec. p. 240. zalites look on themselves as the defenders of the unity and justice of GOD.9 4. They held that if a professor of the true religion be guilty of a grievous sin, and die without repentance, he will be eternally damned, though his punishment will be lighter than that of the infidels.10 5. They denied all vision of GOD in paradise by the corporeal eye, and rejected all comparisons or similitudes applied to GOD.11 This sect are said to have been the first inventors of scholastic divinity,11 and are subdivided into several inferior sects, amounting, as some reckon, to twenty, which mutually brand one another with infidelity:13 the most remarkable of them are:- I. The Hodeilians, or followers of Hamdân Abu Hodeil, a Mótazalite doctor, who differed something from the common form of expression used by this sect, saying that GOD knew by his knowledge, but that his knowledge was his essence; and so of the other attributes: which opinion he took from the philosophers, who affirm the essence of GOD to be simple and without multiplicity, and that his attributes are not posterior or accessory to his essence, or subsisting therein, but are his essence itself: and this the more orthodox take to be next kin to making distinctions in the deity, which is the thing they so much abhor in the Christians.1 As to the Korân's being created, he made some distinction; holding the word of GOD to be partly not in subjecto (and therefore uncreated), as when he spake the word Kûn, i.e., Fiat, at the