SOURCE: "Faith and Fiction: Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night," in Canadian Literature, No. 128, Spring, 1991, pp. 39-50.

[In the following essay, Pell examines religious and spiritual themes in The Watch That Ends the Night, arguing that the novel's primary subject is a "search for religious peace—a truce between man's spirit and his fate."]

There is an inherent tension, even conflict, between faith and fiction. The modern realistic novel has a professed mimetic relationship to the post-Christian era we live in that is artistically inimical to acts of grace and expressions of faith. This conflict is somewhat analogous to the crisis in modern theology which has attempted to respond to people's spiritual need in an age bereft of God. Neo-orthodox and liberal theologians have struggled, from opposite directions, to provide a "theology of mediation" between the religious tradition and the modern mind. Neo-orthodoxy, led by Karl Barth, has emphasized revelation and the Word of God as the timeless and timely answer to man's quest, while liberal theologians, such as Paul Tillich, repudiate past dogma and redefine God in terms of man's "existential experience."

Similarly, modern religious writers who find their vision and vocation no longer coincide with the spirit of the age are, like modern theologians, attempting to communicate a vision of God to a godless world. And, like the theologians', the novelists' dilemma resolves itself into two possibilities: do they offer a dogmatic, theological answer imposed from outside onto their characters' struggles, or can they realize a spiritual solution arising out of the existential experience of their characters?

Paradoxically, this godless age could be extremely propitious for religious fiction. In this century, society has been stripped of religious complacency and materialistic security; many people are asking the basic questions of existence for which Christians have always claimed to have The Answer. But dramatizing a religious vision within the creative logic of realistic fiction can cause almost insurmountable tensions and problems for the artist. And communicating this vision to a sceptical world requires infinite talent and tact.

Religious novelists therefore, as novelists, must have as strong a commitment to their art as to their faith. Traditionally, the novel has been seen as a reflector of reality. Therefore writers of realistic fiction, though their convictions of a Higher Reality will influence their themes and form, cannot falsify life. They must admit evil, suffering, disbelief and temptation—in other words "sin"—into their world along with righteousness and belief. They must honestly portray the agonies of doubt along with the fervour of faith. Above all, they cannot impose an ultimate solution on the existential struggles of the characters deus ex machina, nor miraculously transpose their finite quests into an infinite realm. These artistic problems must be worked out with great care within the novel itself. The struggle for religious meaning against doubt and sin cannot be expounded as abstract dogma. It must be integrated into the fabric of the plot, presented as dramatic conflict arising out of the convictions of the characters, and resolved with fidelity to the artistic logic of the fiction and the finite complexities of life.

In other words, Christian novelists who wish to communicate their religious vision through realistic fiction to a post-Christian society must portray realistically and dramatically the action of God's grace in fallen nature. And all serious religious novelists have found a tremendous struggle between the demands of their art and their faith, their fidelity to fallen nature and their commitment to divine grace. As François Mauriac asked: "How can I reconcile so distorted a view of the human animal with the faith I claim to have in his vocation to sanctity?" [quoted in Philip Stratford's Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in Greene and Mauriac, 1964.] And in the end he could not, and he ceased to write novels.

Let me explain how one of the founding fathers of modern Canadian fiction, and the self-appointed spokesman for Canada in the twentieth century, attempted to resolve this artistic tension in his works, and more particularly in his finest novel. In four books of essays and seven novels, Hugh MacLennan chronicled the historical maturation of Canada from colonialism to atomic angst and paralleled it with his own personal spiritual journey from Calvinism to Christian Existentialism. In a sociological oversimplification, he generalized his personal experience of the joyless and inhibiting Cape Breton Calvinism into a national identity crisis, and his own religious quest for a theology for the modern age, "a new vision of God," into the spiritual pilgrimage of the twentieth century.

In two of his essays [from Cross-Country], "Help Thou Mine Unbelief" and "A Second Look," MacLennan warns: "History reveals clearly that no civilization has long survived after that civilization has lost its religion." But, if "the state of mind resulting from our loss of the sense of God's nearness constitutes the greatest crisis of our time," this loss of faith is due to the dominance of science and rationalism in our society. And the apparent incompatibility of science and religion within the modern mind he ascribes to the evils of a "puritan education" that exchanges mysticism for materialism:

So the end-product of puritanism has been enthroned, science unreconciled with religion, and by what seem to be logical steps we have been led into the solitude of a purposeless universe. This is what I believe to be the essence of the spiritual crisis we face. We are alone and we are purposeless.

However, MacLennan feels that now "with the churches all but empty shells, the hunger for a believable religion may well be stronger than at any time in world history since the reign of Caracalla." And he does not believe that traditional Christian doctrine contains "a countervailing idea great enough and sustaining enough to save society from totalitarianism and our own souls from the materialistic desert in which they now wander." He calls for a "reconstruction of Christian theology" to forge "new symbols" for a "new vision of God." Scientists must develop "a genuine synthesis of knowledge" and from it formulate new "concepts of God" compatible with "modern scientific discoveries" and intelligible to a scientific, industrial society. It is, perhaps, the refusal of science to undertake this commission that led MacLennan to search for a theology of mediation, a redefinition of God for modern man, in the world of his fiction.

MacLennan's greatest assets as a novelist, most critics agree, are the traditional virtues of interesting plots, narrative action pieces, well-realized characters, and vivid settings that were his professed aim in order to "entertain" his readers. Unfortunately his greatest defect, and this also often over-rides his virtues, is that MacLennan was first and foremost an essayist. The conflict between his desire to instruct—and we have seen that this most often had a religious motivation—and his responsibilities as a novelist to "entertain" is constantly felt in his works. Although this dual commitment results in technical weaknesses, it also gives his books the universal layers of meaning that "if they do not make them great, at least make them much more than ordinary romantic-idealist novels intended for well-meaning members of the Book-of-the-Month Club" [George Woodcock, Hugh MacLennan, 1969]. But the tension between faith and fiction may account for the fact that MacLennan's novel writing grew increasingly slower and more difficult over the years.

The essential pattern that emerges from MacLennan's fiction is remarkably similar to that which Gordon Roper describes as characteristic of those "spiritual biographies" written in Canada between 1880 and 1920:

The novel traces his [the central character's] doubts, loss of faith, and his search for a new religious position, unorthodox and undogmatic, or for some substitute "religion." The chief problems are the inspiration of the Bible, the presence of pain and evil in the universe, and the divinity of Christ; solutions are found in Pantheism, universalism, and a belief in "Brotherhood," "true Christianity," the "living Jesus of the Gospels." [Carl F. Klinck, editor, Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 1965]

For in many ways MacLennan's very traditional novels are fighting the theological battles of the nineteenth century. His heroes repudiate the doctrines of Calvinism but cannot free themselves from its psychological legacy of guilt; they deny the reality of God in the world and then desperately search for alternative "religions" to console their emptiness and anxiety. But all humanist solutions—social, political, materialistic, even personal relationships—ultimately fail them, and they must eventually find a spiritual Absolute to give their lives meaning and purpose.

This general pattern is developed in progressive stages, and with growing disillusionment, through MacLennan's novels. In Barometer Rising (1941) Neil Macrae and Penny Wain triumph over the repressive forces of Calvinism and colonialism to enter an optimistic future. While there is still confidence that politically Canada can forge a "new order" that will unite the old and new worlds, the lovers can find personal salvation in integrity, self-knowledge and human love. The idea that individual lives might be part of "a pattern possessing a wider meaning" is only a peripheral theme. In Two Solitudes (1945), although the struggle for Canadian unity is dramatized in all its tragic, and religious, complexity in the first part, MacLennan imposes a symbolic solution on the second half. Paul Tallard and Heather Methuen in their marriage represent an end to the puritan tyranny of the past (both Catholic and Protestant) and to racial enmity. Their "personal religion" is founded on self-knowledge and love and humanistic optimism, but again there is a wise old man in the background hinting at a larger "pattern" which sanctifies the whole of life.

The Precipice (1948) is an overly-schematized analysis of the legacies of puritanism without God in Canada and the United States. Having escaped the sexual hypocrisy of Calvinist Canada, Lucy Cameron finds that the American inheritance is compulsive materialism. MacLennan, however, never clearly defines either the problem ("the precipice") or the solution. This is a transitional novel. Since humanist, political answers are now seen to have failed MacLennan's "well-meaning generation," he turns to the personal, religious vision which has only been hinted at in the previous novels, expressing it in didactic rhetoric. Marcia converts to Roman Catholicism, and Lucy becomes the personification of "grace" in her acceptance and forgiveness of her husband's sins, but neither answer is a convincing outcome of the plot. Each Man's Son (1951) recapitulates most of MacLennan's previous religious themes. Daniel Ainslie, too, suffering "the ancient curse" of Calvin, attempts to justify himself through hard work and to achieve immortality through a son. Repudiating God, he faces existential meaninglessness. But in a melodramatic and moving conclusion he comes to see that only selfless love can conquer sin and guilt. The dramatization of human conflict, doubt, despair and love in this novel gives it a vitality that overcomes the occasional thematic rhetoric.

MacLennan embodies the whole pattern of this spiritual pilgrimage in his finest novel, The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), and finally arrives at his twentieth century "shrine": a radical redefinition of God to answer the existential dilemma of modern man, a redefinition with suggestive affinities to the liberal Protestant theology of Paul Tillich. An analysis of this novel reveals MacLennan's theology for a post-Christian culture, and his solution for the modern Christian novelist's problem of writing a religious novel for a secular society. However, while The Watch That Ends the Night is autobiographically sincere and didactically powerful, its theological thesis ultimately compromises its fictional form and undermines its narrative resolution.

MacLennan said that during the writing of The Watch That Ends the Night he shed "the intellectual skin" that his generation had worn:

So long as I wore it myself, my novels had been essentially optimistic. I had believed the barometer was really rising; I had believed … that the two solitudes were bound to come together in Canada. But my last two novels [The Watch That Ends the Night and Return of The Sphinx] have been tragic. My original title for The Watch was a dead give-away; it was Requiem. Requiem for one I had loved who had died, but also for more: requiem for the idealists of the Thirties who had meant so well, tried so hard and gone so wrong. Requiem also for their courage and a lament for their failure on a world-wide scale…. What The Watch was trying to say in the atmosphere of its story was that the decade of the 1950's was the visible proof of my generation's moral and intellectual bankruptcy. ["Reflections on Two Decades," Canadian Literature (Summer 1969)]

Since the "basic human conflict" is spiritual, MacLennan decided to "write a book which would not depend on character-in-action but on spirit-in-action. The conflict here, the essential one, was between the human spirit of Everyman and Everyman's human condition" ["The Story of a Novel," Canadian Literature (Winter 1960)]. Although the theme is the spiritual dilemma of the modern world, and the setting spans the century and the globe in its allusions, this novel is focused on the personal religious quest of Hugh MacLennan in the character of George Stewart.

The narrator, George Stewart, has many obvious similarities to MacLennan: he is a writer and university professor, living in Montreal with his wife, who is dying of a rheumatic heart condition. But George is also the Everyman of his generation, "a generation which yearned to belong, so unsuccessfully, to something larger than themselves." This articulation of the religious theme of the book recalls William James' definition of "religious experience" [in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902]: "that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace." The search for religious peace—a truce between man's spirit and his fate—is the premise and substance of The Watch That Ends the Night as we can see in a theological exegesis of the novel.

Beginning in Montreal in February 1951, George leads the reader gently into a series of flashbacks which span four decades before returning to the present. And, in a pattern repeated throughout the novel, he prepares us theologically for the events he then dramatizes. He tells us that as a boy he had been religious and believed in a personal, living God. Unlike MacLennan's other heroes, George did not suffer the repressions of a strict Calvinist upbringing. Nevertheless, in the disillusionments of the Thirties, like millions of others, he lost his faith in religion, in himself, and in the integrity of human society. And the manifest injustices of the world, symbolized for him in his wife's illness, have increased his rejection of any divine Power. So, in the hubristic, self-centred Fifties he finds his religion, his "rock" and his "salvation" in the palpably moral life and love of Catherine. As Goetsch has pointed out [in "Too Long to the Courtly Muses: Hugh MacLennan as a Contemporary Writer," Canadian Literature (Autumn 1961)], "George belongs to the stock type of naive narrator," and MacLennan is deftly preparing us to see his rash confidence (covering a basically insecure nature) corrected by the passage of time and new religious insights.

Catherine Carey-Martell-Stewart represents a quasidivine "spiritual force" in George's life. She is primarily characterized by the "spirit" or "Life-Force" which has developed in her in response to her life-long struggle against her "fate"—her rheumatic heart. Therefore, in words which MacLennan later borrowed for "The Story of a Novel," George says that this spirit has become for him "the ultimate reality": "I think of this story not as one conditioned by character, as the dramatists understand it, but by the spirit and the human condition." And this spirit is the "sole force which equals the merciless fate which binds a human being to his mortality." It is her strength and her knowledge that "all loving is a living of life in the midst of death" that George leans on for years until he is forced to develop his own spiritual resources.

Among George's generation, in which "so many of the successful ones, after trying desperately to hitch their wagons to some great belief, ended up believing in nothing but their own cleverness," towers the mythological figure of Jerome Martell, Catherine's first husband and George's spiritual father. He too is larger than life, "more like a force of nature than a man," and for the narrator he epitomizes the anguished decade of the Thirties. In Part v of the novel MacLennan recreates Jerome's heroic story. An illegitimate orphan who escapes from his mother's murderer in a New Brunswick logging camp, he is finally adopted by a devoutly religious clergyman and his wife in Halifax. His life has the symbolic dimension of a modern Pilgrim's Progress; we are told that during his youth "he had really thought of himself as a soldier of God. He believed the Gospels literally, and they meant far more to him than they could mean to most people, because he had such a desperate need to belong." But the horror and guilt of World War I had destroyed his religion, forcing him to seek absolution in medicine and politics for the senseless killing.

Of the mid-thirties, George says:

This was a time in which you were always meeting people who caught politics just as a person catches religion. It was probably the last time in this century when politics in our country will be evangelical, and if a man was once intensely religious, he was bound to be wide open to a mood like that of the Thirties.

Jerome is one of many who divert the passions that no longer serve a traditional God into this neo-religious faith. Having failed to fill "the vacuum left by his lost religion" with Catherine's human love, he seeks salvation through humanistic works:

I used to dream of a city on top of a hill—Athens perhaps. It was a great privilege to enter it. I used to dream that if I worked hard all my life, and tried hard all my life, maybe some day I'd be allowed within its gates. And now I see the fascists besieging that city….

Confronted by the spectre of Original Sin in capitalist exploitation and fascist evil, Jerome embarks on a crusade to save mankind in the Spanish Civil War. But he is all too aware that his City of Civilization is a substitute for Bunyan's Celestial City, the City of God, as he articulates half of the theme of this novel:

A man must belong to something larger than himself. He must surrender to it. God was so convenient for that purpose when people could believe in Him. He was so safe and so remote…. Now there is nothing but people…. The only immortality is mankind.

When the political gods of the Thirties are discredited, however, George and his generation sell out their ideals in exchange for personal peace and affluence:

In the Thirties all of us who were young had been united by anger and the obviousness of our plight; in the war we had been united by fear and the obviousness of the danger. But now, prosperous under the bomb, we all seemed to have become atomized…. The gods, false or true, had vanished. The bell which only a few years ago had tolled for us all, now tolled for each family in its prosperous solitude.

It is at this point that Jerome Martell returns from the dead, in the manner of Christ, to witness to the second half of the theme: what every man "requires to know and feel if he is to live with a sense of how utterly tremendous is the mystery our ancestors confidently called 'God.'" He has had an unorthodox and existentialist vision of Jesus in his prison cell: "He wasn't the Jesus of the churches. He wasn't the Jesus who died for our sins. He was simply a man who had died and risen again. Who had died outwardly as I had died inwardly." It is this vision that has given him the courage to affirm the value of life in the face of death.

Part VII, the end of the novel, illustrates most clearly the difficulty of expressing and dramatizing a religious vision within the dynamics of a realistic narrative. Faced with his wife's imminent death, George reacts as Everyman, subconsciously revolting against the emptiness of existence: "For to be equal to fate is to be equal to the knowledge that everything we have done, achieved, endured and been proud and ashamed of is nothing." MacLennan resorts to a theological interlude in Chapter iv, in which George explains man's need for a god and the insufficiency of all the various substitutes: reason, success, wife and family, political systems and the state. When they fail, he is prey to the "Great Fear," the existential anxiety that God is indifferent and life is meaningless; this angst threatens to obliterate his identity. Then, using analogies of music—the melodies of Bach and Beethoven—he attempts to describe the spiritual experience that finally resolves "the final human struggle" between the "light and dark within the soul" into an ultimate harmony (paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 13:7):

… which is a will to live, love, grow and be grateful, the determination to endure all things, suffer all things, hope all things, believe all things necessary for what our ancestors called the glory of God.

This union of the spirit of Everyman with the "Unknowable which at that instant makes available His power, and for that instant existing, becomes known" is, in theological terms, mysticism. It is this "mystical approach to a vision of God" which MacLennan has invoked in his essays [in Cross-Country] as a new theology of mediation for the twentieth century. This vision defeats the modern death wish, vindicates God to scientific man, justifies the human plight and celebrates life: "it is of no importance that God appears indifferent to justice as men understand it. He gave life. He gave it. Life for a year, a month, a day or an hour is still a gift."

In the final chapters of the novel, MacLennan attempts to dramatize this theology in his fiction. But the mystical encounter of the anguished George with the revenant Jerome, who teaches him to confront death by dying to self, is neither dramatically compelling nor realistically convincing. The characters have become puppets "wired for sound" by the didactic commentator offstage. And in the Epilogue, the world of the realistic novel has been completely transposed into a metaphysical abstraction:

All our lives we had wanted to belong to something larger than ourselves. We belonged consciously to nothing now except to the pattern of our lives and fates. To God, possibly. I am chary of using that much-misused word, but I say honestly that at least I was conscious of His power. Whatever the spirit might be I did not know, but I know it was there.

As I suggested in my introduction, MacLennan's analysis of the modern spiritual dilemma and his "theology of mediation" have suggestive similarities (though no documented debt) to Paul Tillich's doctrine of "the courage to be." According to Tillich [in The Courage to Be, 1952] (and MacLennan dramatizes this failure in the experiences of Jerome Martell and George Stewart), as popular faiths for the twentieth century, "the courage to be as a part" and "the courage to be as oneself" are ultimately disappointing: "the former, if carried through radically, leads to the loss of the self in collectivism and the latter to the loss of the world in Existentialism."

However, Tillich offers an alternative. This is the "courage to be" which "is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable," and which also takes into itself death and meaninglessness. The source of this courage is "absolute faith … which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content." But this act of the courage to be is a manifestation of "the ground of being" which is God, and "the content of absolute faith is the God above God." This new vision of God transcends the old doctrines of theism: God as a vague symbol, God as a Person in divine-human encounter, and "the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made a mere object of absolute control"—MacLennan's Calvinist God. Rather, "the courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."

In The Watch That Ends the Night, George Stewart's religious quest may be illuminated by reference to Tillich's ideas. The inner harmony and death to self which George finally arrives at is an experience of "mysticism," defined by Tillich as "the striving for union with ultimate reality, and the corresponding courage to take the non-being which is implied in finitude upon oneself." And George's final affirmation of life is what Tillich calls "the self-affirmation of being-itself":

There are no valid arguments for the "existence" of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being…. Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being-itself.

In this novel MacLennan has attempted to translate this existential theology into dramatic action. Most critics agree on the importance and clarity of the theme of this novel, and on the sincerity and intensity of feeling which give it persuasive power. However, the problem for MacLennan, as for all modern religious novelists, is to dramatize his faith in terms of realistic fiction. And the critics have also noted that this, his best novel, nevertheless suffers from a non-dramatic ending, a transposition of character conflict from physical reality into metaphysical abstraction.

The parallels which I have noted with liberal Protestant theology may help to explain some of the problems which critics have had with the ending of The Watch That Ends the Night and also with MacLennan's later novels. MacLennan's solution to the problem of writing a religious novel in a godless society, as I have suggested, is a redefinition of God to answer the modern questions about meaning and purpose within the existential situations of his characters. His emphasis is on natural and liberal theology, as opposed to revealed and neo-orthodox theology. As a result, MacLennan's view of God, like that of most liberal theologians, is philosophical, hypothetical, and subjective. Tillich, for example, has repudiated "those elements in the Jewish-Christian tradition which emphasize the person-to-person relationship with God"; the personalistic image of God, the personal nature of human faith and divine forgiveness, the idea of divine purpose, and the person-to-person character of prayer and practical devotion. These qualities, traditionally portrayed by religious writers to dramatize God's interaction with this world (for example, in the works of Graham Greene), seem also to be absent from MacLennan's concept of God. His "new vision of God" is that synthesis of science and mysticism which modern man can accept, but God is no longer a Person with an objective reality independent of man's perception of Him. A relationship with this transcendent, impersonal Deity is difficult to portray dramatically. This is one of the reasons why, when MacLennan does portray the existential questions with great realism and complexity and conviction, his theological answer often seems arbitrary and artificial. As a result, George Stewart's ultimate encounter with the divine is distinguished by didactic sincerity and rhetorical intensity—but metaphysical unreality.

Furthermore, MacLennan has been unable to sustain this optimistic "new vision of God" in his later novels. Return of The Sphinx (1967) replays the conflict between the races and the generations of Two Solitudes, but because this novel is MacLennan's elegy for lost idealism, there is no attempt at an optimistic fictional resolution. The lesson here is that every generation must repeat the universal religious quest—from the death of God, through false ideologies, to spiritual grace—but now in a world of moral, spiritual and humanistic disintegration. In the Epilogue, therefore, MacLennan is forced to offer his larger vision of the grace operating in nature that he has not honestly been able to dramatize in his plot. Alan Ainslie's vague, pantheistic optimism lacks even the theological content of the resolution of The Watch That Ends the Night. And, more seriously, it is in rhetorical opposition to the atmosphere and implications of the entire novel. Finally, in the ambitious scope of Voices in Time (1981) MacLennan portrays a civilization destroyed by man's ignorance and evil, offering only a feeble spiritual hope in the mysterious "God of evolution." The religious pilgrimage of the twentieth century seems to have ended, for MacLennan, back in the wilderness of man's self-destruction.

MacLennan was a didactic writer, and his religious perspective was a dominant part of that larger world view of history and sociology—particularly regarding the development of the Canadian identity—that determined all of his novels. He often repeated the D. H. Lawrence dictum: "the novel 'treats the point where the soul meets history'" and he admired the evangelical fervor of writers who have "made the novel a mighty instrument for human understanding" [quoted from The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan, edited by Elspeth Cameron, 1978], feeling that he too must offer his solutions to the spiritual dilemmas of our world. Since he believed that "in any novel, content should be more essential than form" [Donald Cameron, "Hugh MacLennan: The Tennis Racket Is an Antelope Bone," in Conversations with Canadian Novelists, 1973], there is always the danger in MacLennan's art that his faith will distort his fiction. Since his religious concerns predisposed him toward thesis novels, his greatest weakness was the tendency to manipulate plot and character development toward a theological solution. Therefore, his structures often appear schematically contrived; the endings do not grow naturally out of character or action but are conceived thematically and invoked externally. His major characters are inevitably vehicles for his ideas and spokespeople for his rhetorical interludes, which are not well assimilated into either plot or characterization.

If MacLennan is obviously more of an essayist than a stylist in his novels, this, too, is partly a result of his faith. For he scorned the modern technical experimenters who, he feels, all seem to denigrate life: the famous contemporary writers of America and Europe who have devoted "their immense technical abilities to the dissection of cowards, drunkards, weaklings, criminals, psychotics, imbeciles, deviates, and people whose sole common denominator seems to be a hatred of life and a terror of living" [The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan]. This was not MacLennan's vision. In an era of spiritual disintegration his artistic vocation was not so much to seek "to forge the uncreated conscience of his race as to reforge a conscience that has been fragmented" [The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan].

This is an admirable, if unfashionable, theological enterprise. But can it be realized within the artistic form of the realistic novel, a form which is equally unfashionable in the context of postmodernism? While affirming that "there are no religious novels per se," Charles Glicksberg [in Modern Literature and the Death of God, 1966] nevertheless acknowledges the accomplishments of religious novelists such as Mauriac and Greene in whose words "religion is presented as experience, as spiritual conflict, as vision and aspiration, struggle and search and suffering, not as codified theology." In the tradition of the great religious novelists, Hugh MacLennan also dramatically portrayed the spiritual conflicts of modern man and, particularly in The Watch That Ends the Night, attempted to narrate a spiritual resolution which arises out of existential experience. That his fictional narrative tends to become "codified theology" in the conclusion is, I believe, partly a result of his didactic, thesis-centred style and partly a product of the abstract liberal theological model which he invokes as his solution, but which could not sustain his fiction.