“If, with my feelings and views as they now are, I should go through that form, it would be acting a lie.  I cannot do it.”  And no persuasions could induce her to consent.

Like Sarah, she felt much for the slaves, and was ever kind to them, thoughtful, and considerate.  She, too, suffered keenly when punishments were inflicted upon them; and no one could listen without tears to the account she gave of herself, as a little girl, stealing out of the house after dark with a bottle of oil with which to anoint the wounds of some poor creature who had been torn by the lash.  Earlier than Sarah, she recognized the whole injustice of the system, and refused ever to have anything to do with it.  She did once own a woman, but under the following circumstances:—­

“I had determined,” she writes, “never to own a slave; but, finding that my mother could not manage Kitty, I undertook to do so, if I could have her without any interference from anyone.  This could not be unless she was mine, and purely from notions of duty I consented to own her.  Soon after, one of my mother’s servants quarrelled with her, and beat her.  I determined she should not be subject to such abuse, and I went out to find her a place in some Christian family.  My steps were ordered by the Lord.  I succeeded in my desire, and placed her with a religious friend, where she was kindly treated.”

Afterwards, when the woman had become a good Methodist, Angelina transferred the ownership to her mother, not wishing to receive the woman’s wages,—­to take, as she said, money which that poor creature had earned.

There is no evidence that, up to the time of her first visit to Philadelphia, in 1828, she saw anything sinful in owning slaves; indeed, Sarah distinctly says she did not.  She took the Bible as authority for the right to own them, and their cruel treatment by their masters was all that distressed her for many years.

Like most of her young companions, Angelina had great respect for the ordinary observances of religion without much devotional sense of its sacred obligations.  But Sarah did not neglect her duty as godmother.  Her searching inquiries and solemn warnings had their effect, and soon awakened a slumbering conscience.  But its upbraidings were not accepted unquestionably by Angelina, as they had been by Sarah.  They only stung her into a desire for investigation.  She must know the why; and her strong self-reliance helped her judgment, and buoyed her up amid waves of doubt and anxiety that would have submerged her more timid sister.

In the first letter of hers that was preserved, written in January, 1826, we are introduced to her religious feelings, and find that they were formed by the pattern set by Sarah, save that they lacked Sarah’s earnestness and sincere conviction.  She acknowledges herself a poor, miserable sinner, but the tone is that of confidence that she will come out all right, and that it isn’t really such a dreadful thing to be a sinner after all.  In this letter, too, she mentions the death of her brother Benjamin, and in the same spirit in which Sarah wrote of it.