Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Fielding

Fielding lands the punch with a neat theological bait-and-switch: worship cash and you dont get a benevolent deity, you get a demon. The line works because it refuses the usual moralists bargain that riches merely distract you from virtue; instead, it treats money as an active, parasitic force. Elevate it to godhood and it doesnt just sit on the altar - it starts haunting the house.

The phrasing is calibrated for a culture still fluent in Christian symbolism, where "god" implies order, providence, and meaning, while "devil" signals obsession, temptation, and self-sabotage. Fielding smuggles in a psychological insight under the religious metaphor: the more sacred the pursuit of money becomes, the more it metastasizes into anxiety. It plagues you not because money is inherently evil, but because devotion turns it into a measuring stick for everything else - status, safety, even self-respect. That conversion rate is brutal.

Context matters. Fielding wrote in an England where commerce and speculation were reshaping daily life, and the early novel was busy mapping how people perform virtue in a market society. His fiction skewers hypocrisy: characters who speak morality while quietly pricing out their souls. This aphorism is aimed at that emerging bourgeois piety - the kind that can quote scripture on Sunday and treat profit like salvation the rest of the week. Its not anti-ambition; its anti-idolatry, and idolatry, Fielding suggests, always collects interest.