This paper examines Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last, focusing on how the two novels present a religious solution to the contemporary challenge of imagining an authentically British commercial virtue. Contemporary writers defending commerce presented ‘manners’ as a new type of virtue nurtured through commercial exchange; however, conceptualizing a new British commercial virtue free from the degeneracy of French manners proved to be challenging, as reflected in the ambivalence in the writings delineating specifically British ways of polite living. Such ambiguity can be found in representative sentimental novels of the time, which often portrayed men and women of sentiment as embodying authentic British manners but also suggested doubt about the feasibility of those ideals. Fielding’s two novels also evoke both hope for, and reservations about, sentimental love of humanity as a viable virtue in modern commercialized Britain. However, they align these two conflicting viewpoints as stages in a coherent path toward religious growth, thus depicting mid-eighteenth-century Britain as a rich soil for spiritual growth rather than a site of persecution for the anachronistically virtuous. To prove this, this paper highlights the importance of Christian resignation that David Simple demonstrates in his deathbed ruminations, as it completes the author’s vision of religious faith as the most realistic and accessible virtue in modern commercialized Britain. In this moral vision, David’s initial valorization of true friendship, and his later realization of its disastrous consequences, all contribute to propelling him to the status of the true modern, Christian hero rather than depicting him as the attractive yet ultimately ineffectual man of sentiment. This paper aims to elucidate Fielding’s religious answer to the contemporary search for a viable model of national, commercial virtue, highlighting both the underestimated coherence of the Simple trilogy and their significance in reevaluating eighteenth-century sentimental novels’ participation in the socio-moral discourse of their time.