The Free Church of Universal Religion

Don't bother to Google that.  The reference in the title is to the church established in Tacoma, Washington, by Alfred W. Martin.  Or rather it is the church that he led to break from the Unitarian fellowship to become a Free Church around 1894.  It doesn't seem to exist anymore, but the name is one that reflects the early interest and work of this EC Leader, pre-EC.

Martin served as an Associate Leader for the New York Society for Ethical Culture (1907-1932) and, for twenty of those years, gave Sunday evening programs on comparative religion.  A large number of his works are already listed in the Bibliography of Ethical Culture.  I recently had the opportunity to talk about his work with the Ethical Society of Austin.  Preparing for that talk led me to a memorial essay by George O'Dell, Martin's colleague at NYSEC, which was published in World Unity Magazine in 1934.  O'Dell's personal knowledge of Martin, his life, and his work helped give me a more rounded picture of a very prolific writer who doesn't seem to figure in the "folklore" of Ethical Culture.  That is to say, few of us have ever heard of him.

Whether or not that will change as a result of my research, I can't say.  However, I have had several gratifying days of searching for and documenting his work.  While the same bibliographic quandaries his work raised earlier still remain, I am pleased to be able to add more entries from The Free Church Record, the serial that Martin edited and published from 1893 to 1900.  While much of Martin's writing in that journal reflect his own "spiritual journey" on a clearly theistic path, Ethical Culture is present here and there in the volumes of the journal that I have documented so far (1896 - 1897).  Since I can't yet resolve that issue of whether to "include everything" or just focus on what he wrote while actively engaged in Ethical Culture, I am just appending his non-EC writing to the Bibliography (temporarily, of course) while I figure out the best approach.  I do think the insights offered by his earlier writings will be useful if someone decides to do a more thorough study of Martin's development than is provided by O'Dell's brief tribute.