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]