Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler takes a concept designed to police private behavior and flips it into a scalpel for Victorian respectability. By keeping the familiar frame of "the seven deadly sins" and swapping in abrasively practical items, he exposes the churchy list as a kind of moral parlor game: tidy categories meant to shame desire while leaving the real engines of misery and social control untouched.

The first three - want of money, bad health, bad temper - land like anti-sermons. They treat poverty and illness not as spiritual failings but as life-ruiners that moralists conveniently rebrand as individual shortcomings. Butler is mocking that impulse to turn structural hardship into personal guilt. Then he spikes the punch with "chastity" and "family ties", two Victorian sacred cows. Calling chastity a sin isn’t just a sex joke; it’s a critique of how purity becomes a tool for repression, especially of women, and how "family" can function less as refuge than as obligation, inheritance, and surveillance.

The most acidic line is "knowing that you know things" - a jab at smug certainty, the self-congratulating rationalist or theologian who mistakes confidence for truth. It’s epistemic vanity dressed as virtue. Ending with "believing in the Christian religion" pushes the satire into open heresy, but the target isn’t faith as comfort; it’s institutional Christianity as a system that blesses hierarchy, certitude, and compliant suffering.

Butler, writing in the shadow of Darwin and amid religious doubt, isn’t offering a new catechism. He’s showing how moral lists reveal the anxieties of the people who write them - and how easily "sin" becomes a language for enforcing the status quo.