The first activity to receive our attention is something of a footnote to the monumental labours of John Dury. His design was among the grandest: from 1628 to the year of his death, 1680, he strived in the cause of ‘ecclesiastical pacification’ between the disparate branches of the Lutheran and Calvinist churches, initially in the context of the Thirty Years War, but struggling on in the changed conditions of Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia. In the main, his projects have been regarded as a curious sideline to the period, the activities of an eccentric idealist, working against the grain of his times. While his reputation is now being rescued from whiggish ecumenical historians, what is of present interest is his relationship with the godly ministers of England. Dury's activities brought him into the Puritan milieu twice; once in the 1640s, when he was a member of the Westminster Assembly and preached to Parliament: Hugh Trevor-Roper identified him, perhaps a little portentously, as one of ‘the philosophers of the country party’, showing John Gauden summoning the triumvirate of Samuel Hartlib, John Dury and Jan Amos Comenius in his sermon to both Houses of Parliament in late 1640. However, Dury's arrival in the 1640s was by no means his first visit to England, or his first contact with prominent godly divines.