If the Brethren had now been desirous of Church extension, they would, of course, have turned Cennick's societies into Moravian congregations. But the policy they now pursued in the West was a repetition of their suicidal policy in Yorkshire. Instead of forming a number of independent congregations, they centralized the work at Tytherton, and compelled the other societies to wait in patience. At Bristol, then the second town in the kingdom, the good people had to wait ten years (1755); at Kingswood, twelve years (1757); at Bath, twenty years (1765); at Malmesbury, twenty-five years (1770); at Devonport, twenty-six years (1771); and the other societies had to wait so long that finally they lost their patience, and died of exhaustion and neglect. As soon as Cennick, however, had left his societies in the care of the Brethren {1746.}, he set off on a tour to Germany, spent three months at Herrnhaag, was received as a member, returned a Moravian, and then entered on his great campaign in Ireland. He began in Dublin, and took the city by storm. For a year or so some pious people, led by Benjamin La Trobe, a Baptist student, had been in the habit of meeting for singing and prayer; and now, with these as a nucleus, Cennick began preaching in a Baptist Hall at Skinner's Alley. It was John Cennick, and not John Wesley, who began the Evangelical Revival in Ireland. He was working in Dublin for more than a year before Wesley arrived on the scene. The city was the hunting ground for many sects; the Bradilonians and Muggletonians were in full force; the Unitarians exerted a widespread influence; and the bold way in which Cennick exalted the Divinity of Christ was welcomed like a pulse of fresh air. The first Sunday the people were turned away in hundreds. The hall in Skinner's Alley was crowded out. The majority of his hearers were Catholics. The windows of the hall had to be removed, and the people were in their places day after day three hours before the time. On Sundays the roofs of the surrounding houses were black with the waiting throng; every window and wall became a sitting; and Cennick himself had to climb through a window and crawl on the heads of the people to the pulpit. "If you make any stay in this town," wrote a Carmelite priest, in his Irish zeal, "you will make as many conversions as St. Francis Xavier among the wild Pagans. God preserve you!" At Christmas Cennick forgot his manners, attacked the Church of Rome in offensive language, and aroused the just indignation of the Catholic priests. "I curse and blaspheme," he said, "all the gods in heaven, but the Babe that lay in Mary's lap, the Babe that lay in swaddling clothes."