Wealth & Money Quote by Hannah More

Forgiveness, in Hannah More's hands, isn't framed as saintly surrender; it's framed as shrewd bookkeeping. Calling it "the economy of the heart" smuggles a moral argument into the language of budgets and balance sheets, a register her late-18th-century audience understood intimately as commerce expanded and virtue was increasingly marketed as social capital. She isn't asking you to feel warmer. She's asking you to stop overspending.

The sentence works because it recasts rage as a luxury good with terrible returns. "Expense", "cost", "waste" stack up like items on a receipt, turning anger and hatred into ongoing maintenance fees rather than righteous fuel. The subtext is quietly disciplinary: if you cling to grievance, you're not just morally compromised, you're irrationally inefficient. More, a devout Anglican associated with evangelical reform and middle-class moral improvement, often wrote to shape behavior, especially among readers who wanted to see themselves as reasonable, self-governing, and respectable. This metaphor flatters that self-image while steering it.

There's also a gendered undertone in "waste of spirits". For women in More's world, "spirits" meant health, temperament, social composure - resources expected to be managed carefully. Forgiveness becomes a technique of self-preservation in a culture that punished overt female anger and rewarded emotional thrift. Yet the line isn't purely conservative. By arguing that forgiveness "saves", More gives the injured party agency: you don't forgive to absolve the offender; you forgive to stop paying interest on the harm.