Project Gutenberg's The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650), by John Dury

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Title: The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650)

Author: John Dury

Release Date: February 28, 2005 [EBook #15199]

Language: English

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Produced by David Starner, Linda Cantoni, and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY

THE REFORMED LIBRARIE-KEEPER

(1650)

JOHN DURY

Introduction by

RICHARD H. POPKIN

and

THOMAS F. WRIGHT

Publication Number 220

WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY

University of California, Los Angeles

1983

GENERAL EDITOR
  DAVID STUART RODES, University of California, Los Angeles

EDITORS
  CHARLES L. BATTEN, University of California, Los Angeles
  GEORGE ROBERT GUFFEY, University of California, Los Angeles
  MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK, University of California, Los Angeles
  NANCY M. SHEA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
  THOMAS WRIGHT, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

ADVISORY EDITORS
  RALPH COHEN, University of Virginia
  WILLIAM E. CONWAY, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
  VINTON A. DEARING, University of California, Los Angeles
  PHILLIP HARTH, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University
  EARL MINER, Princeton University
  JAMES SUTHERLAND, University College, London
  NORMAN J.W. THROWER, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
  ROBERT VOSPER, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
  JOHN M. WALLACE, University of Chicago

PUBLICATIONS MANAGER
  NANCY M. SHEA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
  BEVERLY J. ONLEY, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
  FRANCES MIRIAM REED, University of California, Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION

This work, with its quaint sentiments and its grim picture of what librarians were like in the mid-seventeenth century, is more than a curiosity. John Dury was a very important figure in the Puritan Revolution, offering proposal after proposal to prepare England for its role in the millennium. The Reformed Librarie-Keeper is an integral part of that preparation. To appreciate it one must look at it in terms of the plans of Dury and his associates, Samuel Hartlib and Johann Amos Comenius, to reform the intellectual institutions of England so that the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation could be fulfilled there.

John Dury (1596-1680), the son of a Scottish Puritan, was raised in Holland.[1] He studied at the University of Leiden, then at the French Reformed seminaries at Sedan and Leiden, and later at Oxford. He was ordained a Protestant minister and served first at Cologne and then at the English church in the West Prussian city of Elbing. There he came in contact with Samuel Hartlib (?-1662), a merchant, who was to devote himself to many religious and scientific projects in England, and with Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670), the leader of the Moravian Brethren, as well as with other great educational reformers of the Continent. The three of them shared a common vision—that the advancement of knowledge, the purification of the Christian churches, and the impending conversion of the Jews were all antecedent steps to the commencement in the foreseeable future of the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. They saw the struggles of the Thirty Years' War and the religious conflict in England as part of their development of providential history.

In terms of their common vision, each of them strove during the decade 1630-40 to help the world prepare for the great events to come. Comenius started redoing the educational system through his textbooks and set forth plans for attaining universal knowledge. Hartlib moved from Germany to England, where he became a central organizing figure in both the nascent scientific world and the theological world. He was in contact with a wide variety of intellectuals and brought their ideas together. (For instance, he apprised Dury of the millenarian theory of Joseph Mede, which was to be so influential in the Puritan Revolution, and he spread Comenius's ideas in England.) Dury devoted himself principally to trying to unite all of the Protestant churches in Europe and to this end began his peregrinations from Sweden and Germany to Holland, Switzerland, France, and England. These travels were to continue throughout the rest of his life, as he tried to negotiate an agreement on the essentials of Christianity in preparation for Jesus' return.

In 1640, as the Puritan Revolution began, Hartlib, Comenius, and Dury saw the developments in England as the opportunity to put their scientific-religious plans into effect. They joined together in London in 1641 and, with strong support, offered proposals to prepare England for the millennium. They proposed setting up a new university in London for developing universal knowledge. In spite of the strong backing they had from leaders of the State 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