“I have passed through some trying feelings of late about becoming a member of Friends’ Society.  Perhaps it is Satan who has been doing all he could to prevent my joining, by showing me the inconsistencies of the people, and persuading me that I am too good to be one of them.  I have been led to doubt if it was right for me ever to have worn the dress of a Quaker, for I despised the very form in my heart, and have felt it a disgrace to have adopted it, so empty have the people seemed to me, and sometimes it has seemed impossible that I should ever be willing to join them.  My heart has been full of rebellion, and I have even dared to think it hard that I should have to bear the burdens of a people I did not, could not, love.”

Angelina’s devotion to Sarah led her to resent the treatment of the latter by the elders, and came near producing a breach between Catherine Morris and the sisters.

Nevertheless, she did join the Society, impelled thereto, we are forced to believe, more by love and consideration for Sarah than by religious conviction.  But she constantly complains of her “leanness and barrenness of spirit,” of “doubts and distressing fears” as to the Lord’s remembrance of her for good, and grieves that she is such a useless member of the Church, the “activity of nature,” she says, “finding it very hard to stand and wait.”

Her restlessness, no doubt, gave Sarah some trouble, for there are several entries in her diary like the following:—­

“O Lord, be pleased, I beseech Thee, to preserve my precious sister from moving in her own will, or under the deceitful reasonings of Satan.  Strengthen her, I beseech Thee, to be still.”

But though Angelina tried for a time to submit passively to the slow training marked out for her, she found no satisfaction in it.  She looked to the ministry as her ultimate field of labor, but she must be doing something in the meanwhile, something outside of the missionary work which satisfied Sarah’s conscience.  But what should that be?  The same difficulties which had humiliated and frightened Sarah into a life of quiet routine now faced Angelina.  But she looked at them bravely, measured herself with them, and resolved to conquer them.  The field of education was the only one which seemed to promise the active usefulness she craved; and she at once set about fitting herself to be a teacher.  She was now twenty-six years old, but no ambitious girl of fifteen ever entered upon school duties with more zest than she exhibited in preparing a course of study for herself.  History, arithmetic, algebra, and geometry were begun, with her sister Anna as a fellow-student, and much time was devoted to reading biography and travels.  All this, however, was evening work.  Her days were almost wholly given up to charities and the appointed meetings assigned to her by the society, into all of which she infused so much energy that Catherine and Sarah both began to fear that she was in danger of losing some of her spirituality.  She says herself that she was so much interested in some of her work that the days were not long enough for her.