_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 16