It harks back to the refugees from the Palatinate who emigrated to the
west coast of Ireland at the same time that their fellow countrymen
under Kocherthal came to New York. Their principal settlements were at
Court-Matrix, Ballingran and other places in County Limerick near the
banks of the river Shannon. As they had no minister and understood
little or no English, in the course of forty years they lost whatever
religion they had brought with them from Germany. It came to pass that
John Wesley visited these villages. He found the people "eminent for
drunkenness, cursing, swearing, and an utter neglect of religion."
(Wesley's Journal, II, p. 429.)

Wesley's sermons reminded them of the sermons they used to hear in their
far-off German home, and a remarkable revival occurred among them.
Subsequently numbers of them followed their countrymen of the preceding
generation to New York and some of them joined the Lutheran Church.
Among the names to be found on the records of our church are those of
Barbara Heck and Philip Embury.

Now some of our ministers, as far back as Falckner in the beginning of
the century, belonged to the Halle or Francke school of Lutheranism,
and the spirit of our church life at this time, as may be seen from the
letters of Muehlenberg in the "Hallesche Nachrichten," was not alien to
that which the Palatines had imbibed from John Wesley, himself a product
of the Pietistic movement of which Halle was the fountain head. One
would suppose that these Palatine immigrants from the west of Ireland
might have found a congenial home in the Lutheran Church and contributed
to the spiritual life of the congregation. But for some reason they did
not. They withdrew from us and helped to organize in 1766 the first
Methodist Society in America.