MOLECULE, the smallest particle of which an element or a compound body is composed, and that retains all the properties in a free state.

MOLESWORTH, SIR WILLIAM, British statesman, born in London; was an advanced Liberal; editor and proprietor of the Westminster Review; edited the works of Hobbes (1810-1855).

MOLIERE, JEAN BAPTISTE POQUELIN, great French comic dramatist, born in Paris; studied law and passed for the bar, but evinced from the first a proclivity for the theatre, and soon associated with actors, and found his vocation as a writer of plays, which procured him the friendship of Lafontaine, Boileau, and other distinguished men, though he incurred the animosity of many classes of society by the ridicule which he heaped on their weaknesses and their pretensions, the more that in his satires his characters are rather abstract types of men than concrete individualities; his principal pieces are, “Les Precieuses Ridicules,” “L’Ecole des Femmes,” “Le Tartuffe,” “Le Misanthrope,” “George Dandin,” “L’Avare,” “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” “Les Fourberies de Scapin,” “Le Malade malgre Lui,” “Les Femmes Savantes,” and “Le Malade Imaginaire”; though seriously ill, he took part in the performance of this last, but the effort was too much for him, and he died that night; from the grudge which the priests bore him for his satires on them he was buried without a religious service (1622-1673).

MOLINA, LUIS, a Spanish Jesuit and theologian, author of a theory called Molinism, which resolves the doctrine of predestination into a mere foreknowledge of those who would accept and those who would reject the grace of God in salvation.

MOLINOS, MIGUEL DE, a Spanish theologian, born at Saragossa; published a book called the “Spiritual Guide,” which, as containing the germ of Quietism, was condemned by the Inquisition, and its author sentenced to imprisonment for life (1627-1696).

MOLLAH, a judge of the highest rank among the Turks on matters of law, both civil and sacred.

MOLLWITZ, a village in Silesia, 20 m.  SE. of Breslau, where Frederick the Great defeated the Austrians 1741.

MOLOCH or MOLECH, the chief god of the Ammonites, the worship of whom, which prevailed among all the Canaanites, was accompanied with cruelties, human sacrifices among others, revolting to the humane spirit of the Jewish religion; originally it appears to have been the worship of fire, through which the innocent as well as the guilty have often to pass for the achievement of the noblest enterprises, which degenerated at length into selfish sacrifices of others for interests of one’s own, into the substitution of the innocent for the guilty by way of atonement to the Deity!

MOLTKE, COUNT VON, surnamed the Silent, great German field marshal, born in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, of an old family; was pre-eminent as a military strategist, planned and conducted the Prussian campaign against Austria in 1866, and the German campaign against France in 1870-72; was in the service of Denmark before he entered the Prussian (1800-1891).