Faith & Spirit Quote by Edward Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald loads a stick of dynamite into a single sentence: he pretends to ask for evidence, but what he really wants is to expose the moral absurdity he sees at the heart of inherited doctrine. The opening clause - "If you can prove to me" - borrows the cool posture of empiricism, then immediately aims it at theology's softest underbelly: the miracle, that convenient exception to the rules that’s always demanded and never demonstrated. It’s not a neutral challenge; it’s a rhetorical trap. Either miracles can’t be proved, and belief collapses into mere deference, or they can, and Fitzgerald still refuses to let the tradition off the hook.

The sting is in the second half, where he compresses the Fall into a tabloid summary: "a woman ate an apple". It’s deliberately reductive, even unfair - and that’s the point. By flattening Genesis into a petty transgression with gendered blame, he highlights how disproportionate the punishment sounds when told without liturgical cushioning: a cosmic sentence handed down to "us all". The phrase "just God" does double duty, invoking divine justice while implying the opposite; it’s courtroom language used to question whether the judge is ethical.

Context matters: as a 19th-century poet translating and popularizing The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald is steeped in skeptical, worldly melancholy. The line isn’t atheism as swagger; it’s disbelief as moral protest, a demand that if God is to be defended, it can’t be on the basis of inherited myth plus collective guilt.