Mysticism and Religious Modernism: Lily Dougall (1858-1923)

Abstract

JOANNA DEAN "The religions of authority are tottering to their fall," the Dean of St. Paul's, W.R. Inge, said in 1905, "but the religion of Spirit is still near the beginning of that triumphant course which Christ foretold for it . .." 1 Three decades later, slightly chastened about the "triumphant course," he continued to distinguish between the faltering religion of authority and the resurgent religion of experience: "It became clear to me, as soon as I began to think seriously about the foundations of belief, that the centre of gravity in religion has shifted from authority to experience." 2 Historians in Canada have largely focused on one side of this shift, and the loss of religious authority has been variously lamented, debated and discussed.3 Very little attention, however, has been paid to the corresponding rise of the religion of experience, the expansive spirituality that appeared in the margins or the "borderlands" of the major churches, in spiritualism, in metaphysical movements like Theosophy, New Thought and Christian Science, in the holiness and higher life movements, and in the popular interest in mysticism.Secular and religious historians alike have given little credence to the spiritual claims of the practitioners of many these movements.While some of the more esoteric expressions of this spirituality provide an easy target, as Ramsay Cook has shown in The Regenerators, they deserve closer attention, in part for their own sake, and in part for the light they shed on Inge's tottering religions of authority.4 The focus in this essay will be on the most respectable of these religions of experience, the popular interest in mysticism that emerged in