Religious Experience and the New Woman: The Life of Lily Dougall

"Intellectual freedom and religious faith are usually understood as mutually incompatible; historians caught up in the binary logic of secularization have generally assumed that faith has been the casualty of free thought. Dougall's life suggests otherwise: the two components of her thought operated as a dialectic, each balancing and fueling the other. It was only because her experiential faith satisfied her 'longing soul' that Dougall felt free to pursue biblical criticism, philosophical idealism, and psychology. These intellectual pursuits broadened her understanding of the experience of faith; over time, the experiential evangelicalism of her childhood expanded to incorporate elements of incarnational Anglo-Catholicism, Quaker inner light, and modernist mysticism. What is intriguing is the ease with which these elements combined to create a religious outlook that was profoundly spiritual and also fiercely combatively independent and liberal."