Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Fielding

Fielding’s line lands like a moral trapdoor: it grants money the status of a god only to reveal, a beat later, that this “divinity” is really a demon in costume. The brilliance is in the switch. He borrows the language of worship and spiritual warfare to describe something that, in 18th-century Britain, was starting to look like a new religion anyway: credit, speculation, commerce, the prestige of “getting ahead.” By framing wealth as a false idol, Fielding isn’t just preaching thrift; he’s diagnosing a psychological captivity. You don’t simply possess money. If you enthrone it, it possesses you.

The subtext is less “money is bad” than “misplaced reverence turns practical tools into tyrants.” Calling money your god implies submission: your time, ethics, relationships, even your sense of self get reorganized around one altar. The “plague” metaphor sharpens that into something bodily and contagious, suggesting that greed isn’t a private vice but a social sickness that spreads through imitation and status anxiety. Then comes the kicker: “like the devil.” Fielding taps a reader’s existing moral architecture - sin, temptation, damnation - and maps it onto everyday economic behavior, making the chase for profit feel not modern and rational but archaic and haunted.

As a novelist and satirist of manners, Fielding aims at hypocrisy: respectable society praising virtue while quietly genuflecting to cash. The warning isn’t abstract theology; it’s a snapshot of a culture learning to sanctify the marketplace, and of the costs that arrive when worship migrates from heaven to the ledger.