John Dury and the Royal Road to Piety

By the seventeenth century the Protestant religion had become severely fragmented. John Dury spent his entire life in an attempt to reverse this fragmentation by letters, books and conferences and his work in this respect has been called the greatest irenic effort in history. He believed that the most significant instrument for the achieving of his goal, second only to the will of God, was a reformation of the current mode of education. His proposals for that encompassed every stage of education and showed a deep understanding of the nature of education and thus he deserves to be regarded as the foremost educationist of his time in seventeenth century England.