"The devil lies brooding in the miser's chest"
About this Quote
Sin doesn’t saunter in; it squats. Fuller’s line turns miserliness from a mere character flaw into an interior occupation, a demon with a lease. “Lies brooding” is the dagger: not the devil as flamboyant tempter, but as a sulking, incubating presence, quietly warming something ugly into maturity. The chest is both literal and symbolic - the seat of breath, heart, conscience - and Fuller pins greed there, insisting it isn’t just what the miser does with money but what money does to the miser’s inner life.
As a seventeenth-century clergyman, Fuller is writing in a moral universe where vice is not psychological “baggage” but spiritual infestation. The miser’s obsession narrows the soul until it becomes a cramped room fit for only one tenant. In that sense, the proverb is pastoral strategy: shock the reader into seeing hoarding as spiritually costly, not merely socially irritating. It’s also rhetorically shrewd because it reverses the miser’s self-image. The miser imagines himself prudent, disciplined, in control. Fuller recasts him as host and captive at once, carrying around an enemy that thrives on fear and scarcity.
There’s a social subtext too. Early modern England was a world of precariousness - plague, poor relief, volatile markets - where charity was a theological duty and a civic glue. By locating the devil “in the chest,” Fuller implies miserliness doesn’t just harm the needy; it corrodes the very organ that might have felt responsibility in the first place. Greed, here, is the slow unmaking of a human heart.
As a seventeenth-century clergyman, Fuller is writing in a moral universe where vice is not psychological “baggage” but spiritual infestation. The miser’s obsession narrows the soul until it becomes a cramped room fit for only one tenant. In that sense, the proverb is pastoral strategy: shock the reader into seeing hoarding as spiritually costly, not merely socially irritating. It’s also rhetorically shrewd because it reverses the miser’s self-image. The miser imagines himself prudent, disciplined, in control. Fuller recasts him as host and captive at once, carrying around an enemy that thrives on fear and scarcity.
There’s a social subtext too. Early modern England was a world of precariousness - plague, poor relief, volatile markets - where charity was a theological duty and a civic glue. By locating the devil “in the chest,” Fuller implies miserliness doesn’t just harm the needy; it corrodes the very organ that might have felt responsibility in the first place. Greed, here, is the slow unmaking of a human heart.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
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