There are few precepts of the Gospel which will appear more easy to a humane and generous mind than those in which we are required to weep with them that weep; and surely there are few circumstances of private life which will more readily command our mournful sympathy than those of that afflicted family, to the poor remains of which you will naturally, on the first hearing of these words, direct your thoughts, and perhaps your eyes too--the circumstances of a family which God hath broken with breach upon breach--of those distressed children whose father and mother have forsaken them almost at once, and who have since been visited with another stroke, which if alone had been very grievous, and when added to such a weight of former sorrows is, I fear, almost insupportable. I believe all of you who are acquainted with the case sincerely pity them, and wish their relief; but I am under some peculiar obligations to desire and attempt it, not only on account of my public character, but as I know the heart of an orphan, having myself been deprived of both my parents at an age at which it might reasonably be supposed a child should be most sensible of such a loss. I cannot recollect any Scripture which was then more comfortable, as I think none could have been more suitable, to me, than that which is now before us. He touchingly and beautifully addresses the orphan family towards the close of the discourse. It must have been eight or ten years after the death of Mr. Some, which took place in 1737, before the Church at Ashley had a pastor placed over it separate from the Church at Harborough, for the first pastor here appears to have been a Mr. John West, who had been a student at Northampton in Doddridge's academy; for though we have no account preserved of the period when he commenced or when he closed his ministry, yet we find that he entered the academy at Northampton in the year 1740. If immediately on the close of his studies he became the pastor of the Church at Ashley, according to the usual term this would not take place until 1745 or 1746; and as we find another pastor chosen within eleven or twelve years from this time, and have no further account of Mr. West, it is probable that he closed his life and his ministry at a comparatively early age. In the year 1757, Mr. Samuel Bacon was chosen pastor of the Church at Ashley, in which office he continued for 32 years. The residence of Mr. Bacon's family was Sutton-in-Ashfield; he studied for the ministry at the academy at Mile End, when Dr. Conder and Mr., afterward Dr., Gibbons were the tutors.