his old-world
creed.

This, then, is the issue of the dramatic interest of the story, that
the attempt to unite the living with the dead ends in the destruction
of the living, in the breaking of hearts, in one case, even unto death.
For the lives and loves of Helbeck and Laura must be regarded as
allegories of the eternal truths which encompass us. It may seem a
harsh, a needless thing to cloud the closing page with such sudden and
unutterable woe. Why should not these two pass out of each other's
lives, as do numberless others who realise the mistake of their
projected union? There is no reason whatsoever save this, that all
things whatsoever are written in _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ are, like the
history of Isaac and Ishmael, told as in an allegory. They are symbols
of the gulf which separates the new life from the old, and they serve
to convey the reasoned conviction of the distinguished authoress that
the inspiration of the "Ages of Faith" is inadequate to the complex
needs of the larger life of to-day.

These two unhappy beings illustrate that law of growth and progress
which forbids the youth to indulge in the pleasures of the child, or
the man to find his recreation in the pastimes of youth. And as with
man, so with the race. There was a time when the world was full of
Helbecks, an age when the religion of the Cross was the highest,
holiest, known. But man, in his maturer years, has outgrown that, just
as the Cross supplanted an idealism more imperfect than itself: and the
proof of its inadequacy is seen to-day in the blaze of evidence
supplied by the slow and inevitable decay of those peoples who were
once its steadiest champions. Spain and Portugal are being numbered
among the dead. Italy and France are making violent endeavours to
escape their doom, by restricting the liberties of the official
representatives of their legally established Church, because they
instinctively feel that their dogmatics mean death to the peoples who
live by them. Hence, the cry, _le clericalisme, voila l'enemi!_ in
France, and the _libera chiesa in libero stato!_ in Italy. The modern
state, the modern man cannot live by the old ideals: the dead would
strangle the living. And, therefore, Laura Fountain, the modern
maiden, must die.

For, look at Alan Helbeck. He is a man who felt, who knew, himself to
be an anachronism, a man who had realised so fully the genius of his
religion, that he was thoroughly uncomfortable in t