SUARES, FRANCISCO, the most celebrated of the modern scholastic and polemical divines of the Roman Catholic church, was born at Granada in 1548. His early studies were singularly unpromising; and it is remarkable, in the history of a man afterward so eminent, that it was not without great difficulty, and after repeated trials, that he obtained admission into the society of the Jesuits. His later career, however, was brill hint, quite in proportion to the dullness of his first beginnings; and he taught philoso phy and theology with remarkable success, first at Alcala, and afterward at Salamanca, Rome, and Coimbra. The accounts given of his habitsof application to study ate almost beyond belief. He is said to have habitually devoted seventeen hours a day to study. Of his power of memory, the marvels related are scarcely less prodigious. He is said to have been able to repeat at will any portion of the whole 23 folio volumes of his own works, even to the quotations from the fathers and other theological writers with which they abound. Snares may truly be described as the ablest and greatest of the modern scholastics; but in his works scholasticism appears in its best form; for although they abound in discussions uninteresting, and indeed unintelligible, to persons unacquainted with scholastic terminology, yet they may also be truly said on each subject to exhaust the whole of the learning, ancient and modern, which existed relating to that subject at the dale of their publication. On the philosophy of the ancients, Snares is especially
copious and accurate; and of most of the modern German philosophy we may find the germ in the pages which he devotes to the account of ihe opinions of the ancients.
In the scholastic controversies on grace and free will, Snares was strongly opposed to the Thomistic doctrine; but lie also rejected the opposite system of Molina. See MOmwism. The scheme of reconciling the freedom of the will with the efficacy of grace, and of saving at the same time, doctrine of " special election," devised by Snares, is called congruism, and is explained under the head MOLINA. The works of Snares are entirely theological, or ascetic, and were printed in 23 volumes folio at. Lyons, Mainz, and Venice. An edition in 28 volumes 4to was completed at Paris in 1861. His treatise De Legibus is much esteemed, and has been reprinted in England.• Snares died at Lisbon in 1617.—See Des Champs, Vie de Suares (4to, Perpignan, 1671).
SlIBAHDAR was, under the mogul government, the title of a governor of a province. It now a native officer, holding a rank equivalent to that of captain under the European o'fficers.