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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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