That Dury’s The Reformed Librarie-Keeper is part of his reform program preparatory to the onset of the millennium is apparent both from its setting and its content.  It was published in 1650 along with two other tracts (not reprinted here)[7] and Dury’s supplement to his Reformed School, which itself had appeared a few months earlier. The Reformed School was a basic presentation of the ideas of Comenius, Hartlib, and Dury for transforming the nature of education in such a way that from infancy people would be directed in their striving toward universal knowledge and spiritual betterment.  The Supplement to the Reformed School deals with the role that universities should take in preparing for the Kingdom of God, a role making them more actively part of the world.

Having placed educational institutions in the scheme of things preparatory to the millennium, Dury then proceeds to place library keeping and libraries in this scheme as well.  Unfortunately, according to Dury, library keepers had traditionally regarded their positions as opportunities for profit and gain, not for “the service, which is to bee don by them unto the Common-wealth of Israel, for the advancement of Pietie and Learning” (p. 15).  Library keepers “ought to becom Agents for the advancement of universal Learning” and not just mercenary people (p. 17).  Their role ought not to be just to guard the books but to make them available to those seeking universal knowledge and understanding of the Kingdom of God.

The library and the library keeper can play important roles in making knowledge available.  As Dury points out, Oxford and Heidelberg have failed to do so.  Dury’s work enumerates very practical problems that need to be solved and integrates them into an overall picture of the library keeper, the library, the school, and the church—­all fundamental components of a better world, if properly reformed.  Reforming involves practical changes directed by the spiritual goal of preparing for the millennium.  And it should be noticed that while Dury had time to worry about how much librarians should be paid and how books should be classified, and while he was occupied in getting the king’s books in their proper place on the shelf, he was also convinced that the penultimate events before the onset of the millennium were about to take place.  A month after his official appointment as deputy library keeper, Dury wrote the preface, dated 28 November 1650, to Abraham von Franckenberg’s Clavis Apocalyptica.  This work in Dury’s translation of 1651 states on the title page that it offers a key to the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation and “that the Prophetical Numbers com to an end with the year of our Lord 1655.”  The work, which Dury strongly endorses, lists as events “which are shortly to com to pass, collected out of the XI and XVI Chapters of the REVELATION,” the destruction of the city of Rome, the end of the Turkish Empire, the conversion of the Jews, and the ruin of the whole papacy.  Thereupon, the Devil will be cast out and shut up in the bottomless pit, and the Son of God will take “possession of the Kingdom” and reign for the millennium (pp. [164-65]).