Two days after his brother’s marriage, Wesley set out for Ireland, where he landed at three o’clock on Sunday morning, April 16, and, on the same day, preached thrice to the Dublin Methodists. Having spent a fortnight in the city, where the members had increased from four hundred to four hundred and forty-nine, he started off on a visit to the provincial societies. At Edinberry, he had “an exceedingly well behaved congregation,” including “many Quakers,” and took the appropriate text, “They shall be all taught of God.” At Athlone, his audience comprised seven or eight of the officers, and many of the soldiers of the regiment to which John Nelson had been attached. Great numbers of papists also attended, maugre the labour of their priests. Several sinners were converted, including a man, who, for many years, had been “eminent for cursing, swearing, drinking, and all kinds of fashionable wickedness.” At Limerick, Wesley preached to about two thousand people, not one of whom either laughed, or looked about, or minded anything except the sermon. Here the society had taken a lease of an old abbey, and had turned it into a Methodist meeting-house. He met a class of soldiers, eight of whom were Scotch Highlanders; and was introduced to a gentlewoman of unspotted character, who, for two years, had fancied herself forsaken of God, and possessed with devils; and who blasphemed and cursed, and vehemently desired and yet was afraid to die. Of the Limerick society, he writes: “The more I converse with this people, the more I am amazed. That God hath wrought a great work among them, is manifest; and yet the main of them, believers and unbelievers, are not able to give a rational account of the plainest principles of religion. It is plain, God begins His work at the heart; then ‘the inspiration of the Highest giveth understanding.’”