Protestant Exiles from France/Book First - Chapter 12 - Section VIII
VIII. Dean of Dromore.
Very Rev. Jeffry Lefroy, son of Chief-Justice Lefroy, was born in 1809, and baptized in St. Anne’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin, April 17. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and took the degree of M.A. in 1832. He married a cousin of Lord Ashtown, Helena, daughter of Rev. Frederick Stewart Trench, by Lady Helena Perceval, sister of the sixth Earl of Egmont. He was ordained to the Christian ministry in 1833, and became the Incumbent of Aghaderg (Loughbrickland) in County Down. He received many letters from his eminent father, to whom he was a congenial correspondent. [I may here remark that the Chief-Justice was a great student of the Bible, a study which he began at the age of nineteen. He writes on 10th August 1822, “I had from the year 1795, more or less, read the Scriptures, but not with faith, nor as a little child, but in the pride of a Socinian spirit, and consequently I remained long in the dark.” “In the year 1816 I first began to have any view of God’s true method of salvation for a sinner.”]
The Chief-Justice wrote to Rev. Jeffry Lefroy on 8th April 1833:—
“I was delighted to hear that you had made your debut in the pulpit, and trust and pray that you may be kept firm to the anchorage you have taken — Christ and Him crucified, the power of God unto salvation. Yes, this is the weapon for slaying Satan; this is the practical, efficient, influential truth for bringing souls to God, whilst your great orators are spending rheir breath in vain, and scattering their tropes and figures, sowing the wind, and consequently only reaping the whirlwind.” “I would give you one caution, that is, to avoid making up a sermon of a collection of observations, having no beginning, no middle, no end — no premises, no conclusion — which might stop anywhere, and might be shaken in a hat, and drawn out as good a sermon as in the order in which it was composed. The first thing is to consider what conclusion you wish to establish; and then, when you lay before your congregation the point or points you mean to establish, go regularly through your reasoning to establish the conclusion. And, if the subject should lead in the discussion to any collateral remark, come back again to your road, and mark that you do so Examine well the literal meaning of your text; it is dangerous not to hold to the latter as the foundation, before you proceed to the spiritual import or application of language.”
In 1876 Mr. Jeffry Lefroy was made Dean of Dromore, in succession to Dean Bagot. Dean Lefroy continued to reside at Aghaderg Glebe, where he closed his useful but uneventful life, at the age of seventy-six, on 10th December 1885.