rophets, 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 These include an as yet unpublished one, dated 16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 be