A few essays have taken their place in the great tradition as masterpieces of intellectual demolition. Among such classics stands Samuel Johnson’s Review of Soame Jenyns’ A Free Enquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil. Jenyns’s “glib optimism” in the face of human suffering (as Walter Jackson Bate called it), and his complacency over the problem that suffering poses to religious belief, struck a nerve. If Johnson knew anything