ABSTRACT
British preachers of all denominations reproached the miser as a personification of covetousness throughout the eighteenth century. The fact that the term miser never actually appeared in the Bible did not prevent hundreds of preachers from invoking it in order to uphold the values of an earlier moral economy against what they viewed to be capitalism's dangerous incursions. An especially common forum for such critiques into the 1730s was the charity sermon, mainly delivered by urban Anglicans, which presented misers as foils to urge congregants that the performance of good works was the only sure path to heaven. After this time, misers continued to appear in sermons and treatises, but mainly as a more general warning that avarice would result in misery on earth and eternal damnation after death. Starting in the 1740s, Evangelical preachers used misers to teach the different lesson that even the most miserable sinners could find salvation through faith alone. By directing attention to wealth in its most sordid shades, all such appeals to misers highlighted the transactional language that commonly accompanied eighteenth-century religious discourse, rendering them subject to sectarian and secular criticism.
