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Author: John Dury
Release Date: February 28, 2005 [EBook #15199]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THE REFORMED LIBRARIE-KEEPER
(1650)
Introduction by
and
Publication Number 220
University of California, Los Angeles
1983
General editor
David Stuart Rodes, University
of California, Los Angeles
Editors
Charles L. Batten, University
of California, Los Angeles
George Robert Guffey, University
of California, Los Angeles
MAXIMILLIAN E. Novak, University
of California, Los Angeles
Nancy M. Shea, William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library
Thomas Wright, William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library
Advisory editors
Ralph Cohen, University of
Virginia
William E. Conway, William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Vinton A. Dearing, University
of California, Los Angeles
Phillip Harth, University
of Wisconsin, Madison
LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University
EARL MINER, Princeton University
JAMES SUTHERLAND, University College,
London
NORMAN J.W. THROWER, William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library
ROBERT VOSPER, William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library
JOHN M. WALLACE, University of Chicago
PUBLICATIONS MANAGER
NANCY M. SHEA, William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
BEVERLY J. ONLEY, William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
FRANCES MIRIAM REED, University of
California, Los Angeles
This work, with its quaint sentiments and its grim picture of what librarians were like in the mid-seventeenth century, is more than a curiosity. John Dury was a very important figure in the Puritan Revolution, offering proposal after proposal to prepare England for its role in the millennium. 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 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]
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.
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 bee to trade for the Advantages of Learning and Learned Men in Books and MS[S] to whom he may apply himselfe to become beneficiall, that such as Mind The End of their employment may reciprocate with him in the way of Communication” (p. 49).
Events surrounding the overthrow and execution of Charles I led Dury to become more personally involved in library matters. After the king fled from London, the royal goods were subject to various proposals, including selling or burning. These schemes of disposal extended to his books and manuscripts, which were stored in St. James’s Palace. John Selden is credited with preventing the sale of the royal library. Bulstrode Whitelocke was appointed keeper of the king’s medals and library, and on 28 October 1650 Dury was appointed his deputy. According to Anthony a Wood, Dury “did the drudgery of the place."[6] The books and manuscripts were in terrible disorder and disarray, and Dury carefully reorganized them. As soon as he took over, Dury stopped any efforts to sell the books and ordered that the new chapel, built originally for the wedding of King Charles I, be turned into a library. He immediately ordered the printing of the Septuagint copy of the Bible in the royal collection.
In the same year that he became deputy keeper, Dury wrote the following tract, one of a dozen he composed in 1650 on topics ranging from the educational to the ecclesiastical. Among the latter was his introduction to Thomas Thorowgood’s book contending that the American Indians are descended from the Israelites, a work that also served as promotional material for New England colonization.
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]).
As is all too evident, Dury’s reform projects did not lead to the millennium. He was active in England until sent abroad in 1654 as Cromwell’s unofficial agent. Again he traveled all over Protestant Europe negotiating to reunite the churches. After the Restoration he was unable to return to England and lived out his life on the Continent trying to bring about Christian reunion. One of his last works, which has not been located, was a shady Touchant l’intelligence de l’Apocalypse par l’Apocalypse meme of 1674. His daughter married Henry Oldenburg, who became a secretary of the Royal Society of England and who helped bring about some of the scientific reforms Dury had advocated.
Richard H. Popkin Washington University
* * * * *
John Dury’s place in the intellectual and religious life of seventeenth-century England and Europe is amply demonstrated in the preceding part of the introduction. This section focuses on The Reformed Librarie-Keeper itself, which was printed in 1650 with the subheading Two copies of Letters concerning the Place and Office of a Librarie-Keeper (p. 15). The first letter concentrates on practical questions of the organization and administration of the library, the second relates the librarian’s function to educational goals and, above all else, to the mission of the Christian religion. The work’s two-part structure is a clue to a proper understanding of the genesis of The Reformed Librarie-Keeper and to its meaning and puts in ironic perspective its usefulness for later academic librarianship.
Because The Reformed Librarie-Keeper appeared in the same year that Dury became deputy librarian of the King’s Library in St. James’s Palace, it has been assumed that he probably wrote the pamphlet as a form of self-promotion to secure the job. An anonymous article in The Library in 1892, for instance, speculates that the pamphlet may have been “composed for the special purpose of the Author’s advancement” and that Milton and Samuel Hartlib urged its production “to forward his claims” while the Council of State was debating what to do with Charles I’s books.[8] Certainly the final sentence of the tract, with its references to “the Hous” and “the Counsels of leading men in this Common-wealth” (p. 31), suggests a connection with the debate, but the tone of religious zeal that permeates the work, and especially the second letter, seems to transcend any specific occasion. Moreover, Hartlib, Dury’s longtime friend and associate in millenarian causes and the recipient and editor of these letters, claims that they and the other, disparate works he selected for the volume are all “fruits of som of my Solicitations and Negotiations for the advancement of Learning” and as such “are but preparatives towards that perfection which wee may exspect by the advancement of the Kingdom of Christ, wherein the Communion of Saints, by the graces of the Spirit, will swallow up all these poor Rudiments of knowledg, which wee now grope after by so manie helps” (sig. A2r-v).
There is, in fact, no way of knowing with certainty if Dury’s motives were “impure,” especially since the exact date of the tract cannot be determined, no entry existing for it in the Stationers’ Register. According to one of Dury’s biographers, but with no reference to source, the pamphlet was printed by William Dugard “shortly after” the latter’s release from prison in the early spring of 1650.[9] The Calendar of State Papers and the records of Bulstrode Whitelocke indicate that Dury was not officially considered for the library post before late summer and not appointed until 28 October.[10]
The contents of the letters themselves reveal Dury far ahead of his time in his conception of the Complete Librarian, but later commentators have generally not understood that the administrative reforms he advocated were inseparable from his idea of the sacramental nature of the librarian’s office—and so have tended to dismiss the second letter because it “merely repeats the ideas of the first with less practical suggestion and in a more declamatory style."[11] Such a comment illustrates how far we are from Dury’s (and the age’s) purposes and hopes, and it shows a great misunderstanding of the religious and moral context within which, for Dury, all human activity took place. As Professor Popkin has shown, Dury considered libraries fundamental to the preparation for the millennium: they housed the texts indispensable to the spread of learning, which in turn was prerequisite to religious unity and peace on earth and ultimately to the millennium itself; for with enough of the right books, the Christian world could convert the Jews, that final step which was to herald the reign of Christ on earth. When, in the second letter, Dury refers to the “stewardship” of the librarian he is speaking literally, not metaphorically.
But if libraries were to serve their purpose in the grand scheme—that is, to make texts easily available—extensive reforms were necessary, and that is the burden of the first letter. Dury’s cardinal principle is that libraries should be useful to people: “It is true that a fair Librarie, is ... an ornament and credit to the place where it is [the ‘jewel box’ concept]; ... yet in effect it is no more then a dead Bodie as now it is constituted, in comparison of what it might bee, if it were animated with a publick Spirit to keep and use it, and ordered as it might bee for publick service” (p. 17, my emphasis). The public that Dury refers to is an academic faculty and not the general public. To insure fullest use he goes on to advocate the necessity of a printed catalogue with yearly manuscript supplements to be issued as a cumulative printed supplement every three years. He does not reach the point of proposing a call-number system but stresses the importance of shelf-location guides in the catalogue. He believes in aggressive acquisition policies and the necessity of good faculty-librarian relations, with the former
The question remains to what extent Dury’s duties as the deputy librarian of the King’s Library allowed him to implement the reforms he advocated on paper. The probable answer is, not very much. The librarian’s duties and responsibilities described by Dury are those of an academic, university librarian, interacting with the faculty and participating fully in the intellectual life of a scholarly community. The role of the librarian of the King’s Library would have been that of keeper of a static and isolated collection, and Dury is particularly critical of a merely custodial role: “... their emploiment,” he writes of the typical librarian of his day, is “of little or no use further, then to look to the Books committed to their custodie, that they may not bee lost; or embezeled by those that use them: and this is all” (p. 16).
The King’s Library was unquestionably magnificent; Charles’s father and brother Henry had been particularly zealous in building it up, acquiring such collections as that of Isaac Casaubon. And Charles had been the recipient in 1628 of perhaps its greatest single treasure, the Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Bible in Greek, certainly an item that would have interested Dury. The library had, in fact, great scholarly potential, but its continued existence was apparently an embarrassment to the Commonwealth, and the Puritan government merely wanted an overseer. So, by the determination of others, the post of deputy keeper of the King’s Library was little but a sinecure for Dury, leaving him free to pursue his many other interests but powerless to implement the reforms he advocated in his pamphlet within the only library over which he ever had direct control. Though he retained the post until the Restoration, he left the library itself early in 1654, never to return.
The DNB notes that Dury’s life was “an incessant round of journeyings, colloquies, correspondence, and publications.” The account might also have added that, sadly, it was a life of many failures and frustrations, since his visionary scheme for the wholeness of life was so out of touch with the jealousies and rivalries of those he encountered. But if the larger vision that underlay The Reformed Librarie-Keeper is now merely a historical curiosity, the specific reforms that Dury advocated, as seemingly impractical in his own time as his other schemes, proved to be of lasting importance. Shorn of the millenarian vision that gave them their point in Dury’s own day, his ideas have become the accepted standards of modern librarianship. Dury himself would not have been heartened by his secular acceptance: “... For except Sciences bee reformed in order to this Scope [of the Christian and millenarian vision], the increas of knowledg will increas nothing but strife, pride and confusion, from whence our sorrows will bee multiplied and propagated unto posteritie....” (p. 31).
Thomas F. Wright William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
[Footnote 1: For Dury’s biography, see J. Minton Batten, John Dury, Advocate of Christian Reunion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).]
[Footnote 2: On the relation of Dury, Hartlib, and Comenius, see G.H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1947).]
[Footnote 3: Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution,” in his Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1972), 240.]
[Footnote 4: On the philosophical and theological theories of Dury, Hartlib, and Comenius, see Richard H. Popkin, “The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Scepticism, Science, and Biblical Prophecy,” Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres (Spring 1983), and Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975).]
[Footnote 5: Quoted in Turnbull, 257.]
[Footnote 6: Athenae Oxonienses, vol. 2 (London, 1692), col. 400.]
[Footnote 7: The omitted works are An Idea of Mathematicks by John Pell (pp. 33-46) and The description of one of the chiefest Libraries which is in Germanie, attributed either to Julius Scheurl or J. Schwartzkopf (pp. [47]-65, in Latin). This seems to be the first printing of The description, which was published separately at Wolfenbuttel in 1653. John Pell’s essay was written around 1630-34 and was prepared for publication in 1634 by Hartlib, but was only actually published as an addition to The Reformed Librarie-Keeper. It was of some importance in making mathematics better known at the time.]
[Footnote 8: “John Durie’s Reformed Librarie-Keeper and Its Author’s Career as a Librarian,” The Library, 1st ser. 4 (1892), 82.]
[Footnote 9: Ruth Shepard Granniss, “Biographical Sketch,” The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1906), 31-32.]
[Footnote 10: See “John Durie’s Reformed Librarie-Keeper,” 83.]
[Footnote 11: Richard Garnett, “Librarianship in the Seventeenth Century,” in his Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography (New York: F.P. Harper, 1899), 187.]
The Reformed Librarie Keeper With a Supplement to the Reformed School (1650) is reproduced from the copy in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Shelf Mark D2882/Bd w/D2883). A typical type page (p. 7) measures 107 x 56 mm. Not reproduced here are two additional parts in the original volume: An Idea of Mathematicks by John Pell and The description of one of the chiefest Libraries which is in Germanie, attributed either to Julius Scheurl or J. Schwartzkopf.
With a Supplement to the
Reformed-School,
As subordinate to Colleges in Universities.
BY
JOHN DURIE.
I. An idea of Mathematicks.
II. The description of one of the chiefest Libraries which is in Germanie, erected and ordered by one of the most Learned Princes in Europe.
LONDON,
Printed by William Du-Gard, and are to bee sold by Rob. Littleberrie at the sign of the Unicorn in Little Britain. 1650.
To the Reader.
Learned Reader!
These Tracts are the fruits of som of my Sollicitations and Negotiations for the advancement of Learning. And I hope they may in time becom somwhat effectual to rais thy Spirit to the exspectation of greater things, which may bee raised upon such grounds as these. All which are but preparatives towards that perfection which wee may exspect by the advancement of the Kingdom of Christ, wherein the Communion of Saints, by the graces of the Spirit, will swallow up all these poor Rudiments of knowledg, which wee now grope after by so manie helps; and till then in those endeavors I rest in the Truth.
Thy faithfull and
unwearied servant
SAMUEL HARTLIB.
A SUPPLEMENT TO THE Reformed School.
Loving freind!
You have offered to mee that which I confess I did not reflect upon, when I wrote the discours you have Published under the name of a Reformed School; which is, that som may think by the waie of Education, which I propose all Universities and eminent places of Learning might subtilly bee undermined and made useless, becaus therein a waie is shew’d how to initiate youths not onely to the Principles of all Religious and Rational knowledg, and in the Exercises of all Moral virtues, but in the grounds of all Civil emploiments, so far, as will make them fit for all profitable undertakings in humane societies, whence this will follow (in their apprehensions) that they shall have no advantage by beeing sent to anie Universities, to attein anie further perfection: becaus the Universities will not bee able to add anie thing unto them, which by their own Industrie, they may not afterward attein anie where els, as well as there. Truly it never came into my thoughts, either directly or indirectly to make Universities useless; nor can it bee rationally infer’d from anie thing in the matter form or end of that discours of mine: but I will grant that such as can see no farther then what wee now ordinarily attein unto; and withal think that there is no Plus ultra in nature atteinable above that which they have conceived, such as I saie may frame to themselv’s this jealousie against that discours: but if they would rais their thoughts with mee a little above the ordinarie pitch, and consider what the Nature of man is capable off: and how far it may, by diligent instruction, by Method and Communication, bee improved: they might rather bee induced to make this inference, if the natural abilities of youths in a School (when reformed) may bee thus far improved: how far more may they bee improved, when they are past the age of Youth, and com to Manhood in Colleges and Universities, if namely Colleges and Universities, could in the sphere of their activities bee proportionally Reformed, as the Schools may bee in their sphere: for it is rational to conclude thus: if the first step of our Reformation will lead us thus far, how far will the second and third lead us? and if Scholastical Exercises in Youths of eighteen or twentie years, will advance them to that perfection of Learning and Virtues, which few of double their age or none almost ever attein unto, what will Collegial and Academical Exercises (if reformed and set upon their proper Objects) bring them unto? I shall therefore to eas you, or such as may have this scruple and jealousie over mee, declare that my purpose is so far from making Colleges and Universities useless, that if I might have my desire in them, they should becom a thousand times more useful then now they are, that is, as far above the ordinarie State wherein they are set, as this School is above the ordinarie waie of Schooling: for if wee look upon the true and proper ends of School, College and Universitie-studies and Exercises, wee shall see that as in nature they are in a gradual proportion, distant from, and subordinate unto each other, so they ought to rise one out of another, and bee built upon each other’s Foundations.
The true and proper end of Schooling is to teach and Exercise Children and Youths in the Grounds of all Learning and Virtues, so far as either their capacitie in that age will suffer them to com, or is requisite to apprehend the principles of useful matters, by which they may bee made able to exercise themselvs in everie good Employment afterwards by themselvs, and as the Proverb is, sine Cortice natare. The true and proper end of Colleges should bee to bring together into one Societie such as are able thus to Exercise themselvs in anie or all kind of Studies, that by their mutual Association, Communication, and Assistance in Reading, Meditating and conferring about profitable matters, they may not onely perfit their own Abilities, but advance the superstructures of all Learning to that perfection, which by such means is attainable. And the true and proper End of Universities, should bee to publish unto the World the Matters, which formerly have not been published; to discover the Errors and hurtfulness of things mistaken for Truths; and to supplie the defects and desiderata, which may bee servicable to all sorts of Professions.
Now according to those aimes and ends, I suppose it may bee inferred, that none should bee dismissed out of the Schools, till they are able to make use of all sorts of Books, and direct themselvs profitably in everie cours of Studie or Action, whereunto their Genius shall lead them; and that none should bee admitted into anie Colleges, but such as will join with others, to elaborate som profitable Tasks, for the Advancement and facilitating of superstructures in things already by som discovered, but not made common unto all; And that none should bee made Publick Professors in Universities, but such as have not onely a Publick aim, but som approved Abilities, to supply som defects and to Elaborate som desiderata of usefull knowledg, or to direct such as are studious, how to order their thoughts in all Matters of search and Meditation, for the discoverie of things not hitherto found out by others; but which in probabilitie may bee found out by rational searching.
Thus then I conceiv, that in a well-Reformed Common wealth, which is to bee subordinate unto the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, wherein the Glorie of God, the happiness of the nature of man: and the Glorious libertie of the Sons of God is to bee revealed; all the subjects thereof should in their Youth bee trained up in som Schools fit for their capacities, and that over these Schools, som Overseers should bee appointed to look to the cours of their Education, to see that none should bee left destitute of som benefit of virtuous breeding, according to the several kinds of emploiments, whereunto they may bee found most fit and inclinable, whether it bee to bear som civil Office in the Common-wealth, or to bee Mechanically emploied, or to bee bred to teach others humane Sciences, or to bee imploied in Prophetical Exercises. As for this School, which
But how far short wee com now of all these designs, I need not to relate unto you: the Colleges as they are now Conformed, can scarce reach to the half of that which the Schools might bring us unto: and the Professors of the Universities com not up to that, which the Collegial Associations might elaborate, if they were rightly directed to set their Talents at work; and if the publick Spirit of Christian love and ingenuitie did possess those, that are possessed of publick places in the Colleges of the Universities. For if this Spirit did rule their Aims and Endevors, there would bee no self-seeking, no partialitie, no envie, nor anie cross actings for private ends, to the prejudice of the Publick; but the generous love of virtue and of profitable Learning, would swaie all their inclinations to a free conjunction; and make all their endeavors subordinate unto the publick good of the Common-wealth of Israel in the Communion of Saints. But how far this Principle of acting is now wanting amongst us all, I shall not need to mention: you have considered it long ago, and wee have together lamented that defect, and the doleful effects thereof: our endevor must bee to seek out the best means of a Reformation therein, and to make use of them as God shall give us opportunities. And truly somthing of this kinde might bee don, without anie great alteration or stir, even as matters now are formed in the Colleges; if God would bee so gracious to us, as to beget in the mindes of those that understand those things, a heartie Aim and Resolution to benefit the Christian Common-wealth of Learning, by their Collegial Relations and Associations one to another. For if men that are ingenuous will call to minde the end first, for which God doth give them all their Talents, and then also for which men of publick Spirits
Your friend and servant.
J.D.
BY
JOHN DURIE.
LONDON,
Printed by William Du-gard,
Anno Dom. 1650.
THE Reformed Librarie-Keeper:
Two copies of Letters concerning the Place and Office
of a
Librarie-Keeper.
The first Letter.
The Librarie-Keeper’s place and Office, in most Countries (as most other places and Offices both in Churches and Universities) are lookt upon, as Places of profit and gain, and so accordingly sought after and valued in that regard; and not in regard of the service, which is to bee don by them unto the Common-wealth of Israel, for the advancement of Pietie and Learning; for the most part, men look after the maintenance, and livelihood setled upon their Places, more then upon the end and usefulness of their emploiments; they seek themselvs and not the Publick therein, and so they subordinate all the advantages of their places, to purchase mainly two things thereby viz. an easie subsistence; and som credit in comparison of others; nor is the last much regarded, if the first may bee had; except it bee in cases of strife and debate, wherein men are over-heated: for then indeed som will stand upon the point of Honor, to the hazard of their temporal profits: but to speak in particular of Librarie-Keepers, in most Universities that I know; nay indeed in all, their places are but Mercenarie, and their emploiment of little or no use further, then to look to the Books committed to their custodie, that they may not bee lost; or embezeled by those that use them: and this is all.
I have been informed, that in Oxford (where the most famous Librarie now exstant amongst Protestant-Christians is kept,) the setled maintenance of the Librarie-keeper is not above fiftie or sixtie pound per annum; but that it is accidentally, viis & modis somtimes worth an hundred pound: what the accidents are, and the waies by which they com, I have not been curious to search after; but I have thought, that if the proper emploiments of Librarie-keepers were taken into consideration as they are, or may bee made useful to the advancement of Learning; and were ordered and mainteined proportionally to the ends, which ought to bee intended thereby; they would bee of exceeding great use to all sorts of Scholars, and have an universal influence upon all the parts of Learning, to produce and propagate the same unto perfection. For if Librarie-keepers did understand themselvs in the nature of their work, and would make themselvs, as they ought to bee, useful in their places in a publick waie; they ought to becom Agents for the advancement of universal Learning: and to this effect I could wish, that their places might not bee made, as everie where they are, Mercenarie, but rather Honorarie; and that with the competent allowance of two hundred pounds a year; som emploiments should bee put upon them further then a bare keeping of the Books. It is true that a fair Librarie, is not onely an ornament and credit to the place where it is; but an useful commoditie by it self to the publick; yet in effect it is no more then a dead Bodie as now it is constituted, in comparison of what it might bee, if it were animated with a publick Spirit to keep and use it, and ordered as it might bee for publick service. For if such an allowance were setled upon the emploiment as might maintain a man of parts and generous thoughts, then a condition might bee annexed to the bestowing of the Place; that none should bee called thereunto but such as had approved themselvs zealous and profitable in som publick waies of Learning to advance the same, or that should bee bound to certain tasks to bee prosecuted towards that end, whereof a List might bee made, and the waie to trie their Abilities in prosecuting the same should bee described, least in after times, unprofitable men creep into the place, to frustrate the publick of the benefit intended by the Doners towards posteritie. The proper charge then of the Honorarie Librarie-Keeper in a Universitie should bee thought upon, and the end of that Imploiment, in my conception, is to keep the publick stock of Learning, which is in Books and Manuscripts to increas it, and to propose it to others in the waie which may bee most useful unto all; his work then is to bee a Factor and Trader for helps to Learning, and a Treasurer to keep them, and a dispenser to applie them to use, or to see them well used, or at least not abused; And to do all this, First a Catalogue, of the Treasurie committed unto his charge is to bee
Thus hee should Trade with those that are at home and abroad out of the Universitie, and with those that are within the Universitie, hee should have acquaintance to know all that are of anie parts, and how their vein of Learning doth lie, to supplie helps unto them in their faculties from without and from within the Nation, to put them upon the keeping of correspondencie with men of their own strain, for the beating out of matters not yet elaborated in Sciences; so that they may bee as his Assistants and subordinate Factors in his Trade and in their own for gaining of knowledg: Now becaus in all publick Agencies, it is fit that som inspection should bee had over those that are intrusted therewith, therefore in this Factorie and Trade for the increas of Learning, som tie should bee upon those Librarie-keepers to oblige them to carefulness.
I would then upon this account, have an Order made that once in the year, the Librarie-keeper should bee bound to give an account of his Trading, and of his Profit in his Trade (as in all humane Trades Factors ought, and use to do to their principals at least once a year) and to this effect I would have it ordered, that the chief Doctors of each facultie of the Universitie, should meet at a Convenient time in a week of the year, to receiv the Accounts of his Trading, that hee may shew them wherein the stock of Learning hath been increased, for that year’s space; and then hee is to produce the particulars which he hath gained from abroad, and laie them before them all, that everie one in his own facultie may declare in the presence of others, that which he thinketh fit to bee added to the publick stock, and made common by the Catalogue of Additionals, which everie year within the Universities is to bee published in writing within the Librarie it self, and everie three years (or sooner as the number of Additionals may bee great, or later, if it bee smal) to bee put in Print and made common to those that are abroad. And at this giving up of the accounts, as the Doctors are to declare what they think worthie to bee added to the common stock of Learning, each in their Facultie; so I would have them see what the Charges and Pains are whereat the Librarie-Keeper hath been, that for his encouragement, the extraordinarie expences in correspondencies and transcriptions for the publick good, may bee allowed him out of som Revenues, which should bee set a part to that effect, and disposed of according to their joint-content and judgment in that matter. Here then hee should bee bound to shew them the Lists of his correspondents, the Letters from them in Answer to his, and the reckoning of his extraordinarie expence should bee allowed him in that which hee is indebted, or hath freely laid out to procure Rarities into the stock of Learning. And becaus I understand that all the Book-Printers or Stationars of the Common-wealth are bound of everie Book which is Printed, to send a Copie into the Universitie Librarie; and it is impossible for one man to read all the Books in all Faculties, to judg of them what worth there is in them; nor hath everie one Abilitie to judg of all kinde of Sciences what everie Autor doth handle, and how sufficiently; therefore I would have at this time of giving accounts, the Librarie-keeper also bound to produce the Catalogue of all the Books sent unto the Universitie’s Librarie by the Stationars that Printed them; to the end that everie one of the Doctors in their own Faculties should declare, whether or no they should bee added, and where they should bee placed in the Catalogue of Additionals; For I do not think that all Books and Treaties which in this age are Printed in all kindes, should bee inserted into the Catalogue, and added to the stock of the Librarie, discretion must bee used and confusion avoided, and a cours taken to distinguish
The second Letter.
Sir!
In my last I gave you som incident thoughts, concerning the improvement of an Honorarie Librarie-keeper’s place, to shew the true end and use thereof, and how the keepers thereof should bee regulated in the Trade, which hee is to drive for the Advancement of Learning, and encouraged by a competent maintenance, and supported in extraordinarie expences for the same. Now I wish that som men of publick Spirits and lovers of Learning, might bee made acquainted with the Action, upon such grounds as were then briefly suggested; who know’s but that in time somthing might bee offered to the Trustees of the Nation, with better conceptions then these I have suggested.
For, if it bee considered that amongst manie Eminencies of this Nation, the Librarie of Oxford is one of the most considerable for the advancement of Learning, if rightly improved and Traded withal for the good of Scholars at home and abroad; If this (I saie) bee rightly considered and represented to the publick Reformers of this age, that by this means this Nation as in other things, so especially for Pietie and Learning, and by the advancement of both, may now bee made more glorious then anie other in the world; No doubt such as in the Parlament know the worth of Learning will not bee avers from further overtures, which may bee made towards this purpose. What a great stir hath been heretofore, about the Eminencie of the Librarie of Heidelberg, but what use was made of it? It was ingrossed into the hands of a few, till it became a Prey unto the Enemies of the Truth. If the Librarie-keeper had been a man, that would have traded with it for the increas of true Learning, it might have been preserved unto this daie in all the rarities thereof, not so much by the shuttings up of the multitude of Books, and the rareness thereof for antiquitie, as by the understandings of men and their proficiencie to improv and dilate knowledg upon the grounds which hee might have suggested unto others of parts, and so the Librarie-rarities would not onely have been preserved in the spirits
I have no time to inlarge upon this Subject, or to conceiv a formal and regular discours, but the thoughts which thus fall into my minde I impart unto you, that you may give them as hints unto others, who of themselvs will bee able to inlarge them either to the Hous, or to such as can in due time swaie the Counsels of leading men in this Common-wealth.