Martha Moore Avery (1851–1929)

Abstract

Martha Moore was born into an established New England family whose accomplishments on the battlefields for several generations, beginning with the Battle of Bunker Hill, had accrued for them some fame and recognition. Martha often boasted in the lineage of her “proud sires.” Her parents were not religious. She recalled that the first prayer she heard in her home was spoken at the funeral for her younger brother. Nevertheless, from her early childhood, Martha claimed to have a passion for intellectual certainty, especially about religion. She spent her adolescence and much of her adult life on a quest for what she referred to as “the Truth.” In that process, she reasoned her way in and out of various religious and secular ideologies, including Spiritualism, Unitarianism, Nationalism, and Socialism. The following paragraphs from her unpublished autobiography, The Longest Way Home to Rome, which reaches the considerable length of several hundred hand-written pages, described various stages of her spiritual quest.