The apple is an allusion, not Genesis's wording
An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.
The sequence culminates in Eden, turning the pattern of a small forbidden act with enormous consequences into a biblical pattern. Genesis 2:16–17 grants access to the garden's trees while withholding one, and Genesis 3:6 records the eating that precedes shame, painful labour, mortality, and expulsion. But Genesis calls the object fruit, without naming an apple. Chesterton uses a recognizable retelling rather than quoting Scripture. King James Version, Genesis 2–3.
The phrase about God's hope is likewise Chesterton's compression, not a biblical sentence. It conveys the loss of the original happiness, but should not be read as a claim that Genesis leaves humanity absolutely hopeless: the same chapter gives clothing to the couple (3:21) and announces conflict between the serpent and the woman's offspring (3:15). In the paragraph's argument, Eden supplies the culminating example of conditional enjoyment; it does not establish that every fairy prohibition has an identical moral basis.
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