As sympathy was the strongest quality of her moral nature, she suffered intensely when, impelled by a sense of duty, she offered a rebuke of any kind.  The tenderest pity stirred her heart for wrong-doers, and though she never spared the sinner, it was always manifest that she loved him while hating his sin.

Angelina, on the other hand, was wonderfully well satisfied with her own power of distinguishing right from wrong; this power being, she believed, the gift of the Spirit to her.  She sought her object, dreading no consequences, and if disaster followed she comforted herself with the feeling that she had acted according to her best light.  She was a faithful disciple of every cause she espoused, and scrupulously exact in obeying even its implied provisions.  In this there was no hesitancy.  No matter who was offended, or what sacrifices to herself it involved, the law, the strict letter of the law, must be carried out.

In the early years of her religious life, she frequently felt called upon to rebuke those about her.  She did it unhesitatingly, and as a righteous and an inflexible judge.

In order to make these differences between the sisters more plain, differences which harmonized singularly with their unity in other respects, I shall be obliged, at the risk of wearying the reader, to make some further extracts from their diaries, before entering upon that portion of their lives in which they became so closely identified.

After Sarah’s return home, in 1827, we learn more of her mother and of the family generally, and see, though with them, how far apart she really was from them.  The second entry in her diary at that date shows the beginning of this.

“23d.  Have been favored with strength to absent myself from family prayers.  A great trial this to Angelina and myself, and something the rest cannot understand.  But I have a testimony to bear against will worship, and oh, that I may be faithful to this and to all the testimonies which we as a Society are called to declare.

“26th.  Am this day thirty-five years old.  A serious consideration that I have passed so many years to so little profit.

“How little mother seems to know when I am sitting solemnly beside her, of the supplications which arise for her, under the view of her having ere long to give an account of the deeds done in the body.”

A month later she writes:  “The subject of returning to Philadelphia has been revived before me.  It seems like a fresh trial, and as if, did my Master permit, here would I stay, and in the bosom of my family be content to dwell; but if he orders it otherwise, great as will be the struggle, may I submit in humble faith.”

By the following extracts it will be seen that living under the daily and hourly influence of Sarah, Angelina was slowly but surely imbibing the fresh milk of Quakerism, and was preparing for another great change on her spiritual journey.