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Rh Philadelphia, then practicing medicine in Zacatecas, had gathered a company of Christian believers. These people had been interested in the religion of the Bible by a visit of Miss Rankin's colporteurs from Monterey some time before. In two years after this beginning by Dr. Prevost there was in Cos a church of one hundred and seventy members, a church-building and a religious paper started, called The Evangelical Torch. News of this awakening reached America, and in September, 1872, at the earnest request of Dr. Prevost, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions sent out its first band of ordained missionaries to Mexico. Protestant influences had then been at work in the capital for ten years. Among those thus inclined were many whose republican principles were so true in type that they preferred a "Church without a bishop" as decidedly as they desired "a State without a king." At nine different points in the city and the surrounding villages were congregations who had turned for sympathy to the little church at Cos. The Presbyterian missionaries, on their way to that point, stopped at the capital, and, finding there this waiting church, they ran up the old blue flag—a token there and everywhere else of republicanism of the best type in Church and State.

Mexico city, Zacatecas, San Luis de Potosi, Monterey, Jerez, Saltillo, Durango, Vera Cruz, Acapulco and Tabasco are now centres of the constantly-enlarging work of the Presbyterian Church. Says the Presbyterian Board's forty-eighth annual report: "Our Church has congregations in a continuous line of States from the Rio Grande to Guatemala, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, thus marking with a large cross the map of the republic." The northern and southern