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...