In 1852 the Raritan Bay Association, consisting of thirty or forty educated and cultured families of congenial tastes, was formed at Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy, New Jersey; and a year later Mr. and Mrs. Weld were invited to join the Association, and take charge of its educational department.  They accepted in the hope of finding in the change greater social advantages for themselves and their children, with less responsibility and less labor; for of these last the husband, wife, and sister, in their Belleville school, had had more than they were physically able to endure longer.  Their desire and plan was to establish, with the children of the residents at Eagleswood, a school also for others, and to charge such a moderate compensation only as would enable the middle classes to profit by it.  In this project, as with every other, no selfish ambition found a place.

They removed to Eagleswood in the autumn of 1854.

And now, as I am nearing the end of my narrative, this seems to be the place to say a few words relative to the religious views into which the two sisters finally settled.  We have followed them through their various conflicts from early youth to mature age, and have seen in their several changes of belief that there was no fickleness, no real inconsistency.  They sought the truth, and at different times thought they had found it.  But it was the truth as taught in Christ Jesus, the simple doctrine of the Cross they wanted, the preaching and practice of love for God, and for the meanest, the weakest, the lowest of His children.  The spiritual conflicts through which they passed, prepared them to see the nothingness of all outward forms, and they came at last to reject the so-called orthodox creed, and to look only to God for help and comfort.

During the entire period of Sarah’s connection with religious organizations, and even from her very first religious impressions, she found it difficult to accept the doctrine of the Atonement; and yet she professed and tried to think she believed it, but only because the Bible, which she accepted as a revelation from God, taught it.  That her reason rebelled against it is shown in her frequent prayers to be delivered from this great temptation of the arch enemy, and her deep repentance whenever she lapsed into a state of doubt.  The fear that she might come to reject this fundamental dogma was—­at least up to the time when she was driven from the Quaker Church—­one of her most terrible trials, causing her at intervals more agony than all else put together.  But the worshipful element was so strong in Sarah that she could not, even after her reason had satisfied her conscience on this point, give up this Christ at whose feet she had learned her most precious lessons of faith and meekness and gentleness and long-suffering, and whom she had accepted and adored as her intermediary before an awful Jehovah.  In her whole life there appears to me nothing more beautiful than this full, tender, abiding love of Jesus, and I believe it to have been the inspiration always of all that was loveliest and grandest in her character.  In one of her letters, written while at Belleville, she says:—­