Jenyns, SOAME

Jenyns, SOAME, was born in London in 1704; studied at St John's College, Cambridge; sat in parliament for Cambridgeshire, Dunwich, and Cambridge town; was a commissioner to the Board of Trade, and died in December 1787. As he was rich he easily acquired a literary reputation, but he lacked capacity for the high metaphysical problems that he attacked, and his books are long since securely forgotten. Indeed his name only survives from the accident that Dr Johnson criticised in the Literary Magazine his Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1756). He condemned the book as shallow and inadequate, and this judgment Jenyns never forgave him. Indeed the argument was not worth his powder and shot, but Johnson in his criticism excelled himself. Jenyns, now grown orthodox, published in 1776 a no less shallow book, View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, for the divine origin of which he strangely argued from its utter variance with human reason.