The _hour_ just now begun may be exactly the period for finishing _some great plan_, or concluding _some great dispensation_, which thousands of years or ages have been advancing to its accomplishment. _This_ may be the _very hour_ in which a new world shall originate or an ancient one sink in ruins. RANGE OF ENTERPRISE. EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN, a celebrated English historian. Born at Harborne, Staffordshire, 1823; died at Alicante, Spain, March 16, 1892. From an article on "The Intellectual Development of the English People," in the _Chautauquan Magazine_, May, 1891. The discovery of a new world was something so startling as to help very powerfully in the general enlargement of men's minds. And the phrase of a new world is fully justified. The discovery of a western continent, which followed on the voyage of Columbus, was an event differing in kind from any discovery that had ever been made before. And this though there is little reason to doubt that the western continent itself had been discovered before. The Northmen had certainly found their way to the real continent of North America ages before Columbus found his way to the West India Islands. But the same results did not come of it, and the discovery itself was not of the same kind. The Old World had grown a good deal before the discovery of the New. The range of men's thoughts and enterprise had gradually spread from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the Baltic, and the northern seas. To advance from Norway to the islands north of Britain, thence to Iceland, Greenland, and the American continent, was a gradual process. The great feature in the lasting discovery of America, which began at the end of the fifteenth century, was its suddenness. Nothing led to it; it was made by an accident; men were seeking one thing and then found another. Nothing like it has happened before or since. FRIDAY. Of evil omen for the ancients. For America the day of glad tidings and glorious deeds.