The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) | Page 2

and Church, Parliament was unable to
fund the project because of the turmoil of the time. Comenius left for
the Continent, while Hartlib and Dury advanced other projects and
involved themselves in the Westminster conference to reform the
Church.[2]
Hugh Trevor-Roper has called Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius "the real
philosophers, the only philosophers, of the English Revolution."[3]
They combined a long list of practical plans with an overall vision of
how these fitted into the needed antecedent events to the millennium.
They made proposals for improving and reforming many aspects of
human activities and human institutions. The advancement of
knowledge, the improvement of human life, and the purification of
religion, which included bringing the Jews and Christians together,
would prepare England for its role when God chose to transform human
history. In a long series of pamphlets and tracts, Hartlib and Dury
turned Comenius's theory into practical applications to the situation
then prevailing in England.[4]
Dury outlined this program in a sermon he gave before Parliament on
26 November 1645 entitled Israels Call to March Out of Babylon unto
Jerusalem. He pointed out that England, the new Israel, had a special
role in history, "for the Nations of great Britain have made a new thing
in the world; a thing which hath not been done by any Nation in the
world, since the preaching of the Gospel in it, a thing which since the
Jewish Nation, in the daies of Nehemiah, was never heard of in any
Nation, that not only the Rulers, but the whole multitude of the people
should enter into a Covenant with their God, ... to walk in the waies of
his Word, to maintain the Cause of Religion, and to reform themselves
according to his will" (pp. 23-24).
Since England was to be God's agent in history, Dury proclaimed at the
end of his sermon that "The Schooles of the Prophets, the Universities[,]
must be setled, purged and reformed with wholsom constitutions, for
the education of the sonnes of the Prophets, and the government of

their lives and with the soundnes and purity of spirituall learning, that
they may speak the true language of Canaan, and that the gibberidge of
Scholastical Divinity may be banished out of their society" (p. 48).
In the same year that he delivered this sermon, Dury married an aunt of
Lady Catherine Ranelagh and was brought in closer contact with Lady
Catherine's brother, Robert Boyle, and the young scientists of the
so-called Invisible College. Dury and Hartlib pressed for reforms that
would promote a better, more useful education from the lowest grades
upward. Convinced by the passage in Daniel 12:4 that knowledge shall
increase before the end of history, Dury and Hartlib sought various
opportunities to bring about this increase in knowledge through better
schools, better religious training, and better organization of knowledge.
Such organization would necessarily affect libraries since they were an
all-important component of the premillennial preparation.
Between 1645 and 1650, Dury wrote a great many tracts on improving
the Church and society. These include an as yet unpublished one, dated
16 August 1646, giving his views on the post of library keeper at
Oxford. The poor state of Oxford's library led Dury to observe that the
librarian is to be "a factor and trader for helpes to learning, a treasurer
to keep them and a dispenser to apply them to use, or to see them well
used, or at least not abused."[5] During his travels on the Continent,
Dury had visited Duke Augustus of Brunswick and was obviously very
impressed by the great library the Duke was assembling at
Wolfenbuttel. In his important Seasonable Discourse of 1649 on
reforming religion and learning, Dury had proposed establishing in
London the first college for Jewish studies in the modern world. In this
proposal, he saw as a basic need the procurement of a collection of
Oriental books. Such a library was not just to store materials, but to
make them available and thereby increase knowledge. Hartlib, in a
pamphlet entitled _Considerations tending to the Happy
Accomplishment of England's Reformation in Church and State_,
written in 1647 and published in 1649, had proposed a central "Office
of Addresse," an information service dispensing spiritual and "bodily"
information to all who wished it. The holder of this office should, he
said, correspond with "Chiefe Library-Keepers of all places, whose
proper employments should bee to trade for the Advantages of
Learning and Learned Men in Books and MS[S] to whom he may apply

himselfe to become beneficiall, that such as Mind The End of their
employment may reciprocate with him in the way of Communication"
(p. 49).
Events surrounding the overthrow and execution of Charles I led Dury
to become more personally involved in library matters. After the king
fled from London, the royal goods