The sentence is Frederic Harrison’s, from Chapter III, “Ruskin as Prophet (a Dialogue),” in Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 92 — where it is a remark about how Britain treated John Ruskin after he turned from art criticism to social reform. Harrison actually wrote “British society can overlook murder, adultery, or swindling”; the popular version drops the word “British” and pins the line on Burke, who died in 1797 and in whose twelve-volume Works the phrase “new gospel” does not appear at all.
“Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling — it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel” Frederic Harrison, "Ruskin as Prophet (a Dialogue)," in Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899), 92. Harrison's original reads: "British society can overlook murder, adultery, or swindling—it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel." Not Edmund Burke, who died in 1797.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Edmund Burke. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The 1899 page
Work
Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates
Chapter
III. “Ruskin as Prophet (a Dialogue),” p. 92
Published
London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1899
Author
Frederic Harrison (1831–1923)
He was labelled a Socialist, a madman, an anarchist, and was overwhelmed with ridicule and abuse. … He retaliated by devoting himself to social and moral exhortations, and ended by founding a Guild to reform and re-christianise England. British society can overlook murder, adultery, or swindling—it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel. The Guild of St. George was relegated to the category of Sandemanians, Jumpers, and Peculiar People.
Trimmed for length
Spoken by the elder of the two walkers. The essay is cast as a dialogue on Blackdown in Sussex between an older man and a young painter trained in Paris who has just dismissed Ruskin as out of date.
Wikiquote’s Edmund Burke page ↗ carries the line in its Misattributed section with the note that it is “actually from Frederic Harrison’s essay ‘Ruskin as Prophet’, in his Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates (1899).”
We then read the book itself. The full text of the 1899 Macmillan volume ↗ carries the sentence on p. 92, inside Chapter III, in a passage about how Ruskin was treated after he founded the Guild of St George.
The Internet Archive catalogue record ↗ confirms the imprint: Frederic Harrison, 1831–1923; Macmillan, London; 1899; 344 pages; the chapter list runs “Tennyson. — Ruskin as master of prose. — Ruskin as prophet…”
Checking the other direction: the phrase “new gospel” returns no hits across all twelve volumes of Burke’s collected Works ↗ on Project Gutenberg, and neither does “overlook murder.”
✓Public domain
The sentence was first published in Frederic Harrison’s Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899). A work published in 1899 is in the public domain in the United States, and the Internet Archive’s scan of that edition ↗ is catalogued as not in copyright. Harrison wrote in English, so no translation question arises.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How Burke got the credit
Every quote site that carries this line hangs it on Edmund Burke, and none of them names a book, a speech, a letter or a date — the standard signature of a credit nobody has ever checked.
✕
The whole sentenceEdmund Burke (1729–1797) Misattributed
The wording“British society” flattened to “Society” Mis-worded
Harrison’s 1899 text ↗ reads “British society can overlook murder, adultery, or swindling.” Dropping that one word turns a barbed observation about how Victorian England treated Ruskin into a timeless-sounding maxim — which is exactly the shape a quote needs to drift onto a bigger name.
✓It is Frederic Harrison’s, first published by Macmillan in 1899 ↗ — more than a hundred years after Edmund Burke died in 1797.
Context
A line about Ruskin, not about Burke
Harrison built the essay as a conversation: two men walking on Blackdown in Sussex on a September evening, an older man whose home is nearby and a young painter trained in Paris who thinks Ruskin is passé, vieux jeu. The elder speaker mounts the defence, and the sentence lands as the hinge of his argument — Ruskin had won the fight for Turner and modern landscape by forty, and would have ended up as unassailable as Tennyson in poetry, had he stopped there.
But Ruskin did not stop there. He turned on the political economists, was “labelled a Socialist, a madman, an anarchist,” denounced interest on capital as usury, gave away a fortune on principle, and founded the Guild of St George ↗ to reform and re-christianise England. It was that, Harrison’s speaker says, and not any ordinary vice, that Britain could not pardon.
It never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.
Why the Burke credit sticks
Burke is one of the most quote-magnetised names in English — the same Wikiquote page that files this line under “Misattributed” also has to dispose of “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil…,” “Beauty is the promise of happiness” (Stendhal) and “Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.).
The line reads like Burke: eighteenth-century balance, a triple list, a sting in the second clause. But Harrison was writing consciously in that register about a Victorian subject, and the giveaway survives in his own text — he wrote about British society specifically, describing a particular national temper in a particular decade, not issuing a universal maxim.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1831–1923 · English jurist, historian & leading English Positivist
Frederic Harrison was a British jurist and historian, and the leading English disciple of Auguste Comte — president of the English Positivist Committee from 1880 to 1905 and professor of jurisprudence and international law to the Council of Legal Education from 1877 to 1889. He wrote constantly for the great Victorian reviews, and this line comes from a book of literary estimates he published with Macmillan in 1899. Ruskin was a lifelong preoccupation: the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica counts Harrison’s life of Ruskin (1902) among his most important separate publications.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Frederic Harrison, “Ruskin as Prophet (a Dialogue),” in Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899), 92.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling — it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel’?” Last verified 3 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/society-can-overlook-murder-adultery-or-swindling-it-never/