But to the aid of human knowledge came a higher faith; he was divinely led. In writing of this third voyage to Dona Juana de la Torres, a lady of the Court and a companion to the Queen, he said: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse by Saint John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah; and he showed me the spot where to find it.”[453]. The end of the world he believed was at hand; by which he meant, perhaps, only the world of heathenism and unbelief. In his letter to the sovereigns he said that “it was clearly predicted concerning these lands by the mouth of the prophet Isaiah in many places in Scripture, that from Spain the holy name of God was to be spread abroad.” Amazing and even fantastic as his conclusions were when they came from the religious side of his nature, they were to him irrefragable, because they were so severely logical. He was the chosen instrument of the divine purpose, because it was to him that the way had been made straight and plain to the glorious East, where God had planted in the beginning the earthly Paradise, in which he had placed man, where man had first sinned, and where ere long was to break the promised dawn of the new heaven and the new earth. The northern continent of the New World was discovered by the Cabots a year before the southern mainland was reached by Columbus. Possibly this northern voyage may have suggested to the geographers of England a new theory, as yet, so far as we know, not thought of in Spain and Portugal,—that a hemisphere was to be circumnavigated, and a passage found among thousands of leagues of islands, or else through some great continent hitherto unknown,—except to a few forgotten Northmen of five hundred years earlier,—before India could be reached by sailing westward. In speaking of this voyage long afterward, Sebastian Cabot said: “I began to saile toward the northwest, not thinking to find any other land than that of Cathay, and from thence turne toward India; but after certaine dayes I found that the land ranne towards the North, which was to mee a great displeasure.”[454] This may have been the afterthought of his old age, when the belief that the new Indies were the outlying boundaries of the old was generally discarded. He had forgotten, as the same narrative shows,—unless the year be a misprint,—the exact date of that voyage, saying that it “was, as farre as I remember, in the yeare 1496, in the beginning of Summer.” This was a year too soon. But if the statement be accepted as literally true that he was disappointed in finding, not Cathay and India, as he had hoped, but another land, then not only the honor of the discovery of the western continent belongs to his father and to him,—or rather to the father alone, for the son was still a boy,—but the further distinction of knowing what they had discovered; while Columbus never awoke from the delusion that he had touched the confines of India.