Increase Mather died today in 1723. He proclaimed a New Jerusalem in Massachusetts based on Purtian principles, and predicted the repatriation of Jews to Palestine as a fulfillment of God's plan for Earth. Like his son Cotton Mather, Increase supported the Salem witch trials, but advised caution in using evidence from dreams and visions in making capital convictions. Cotton Mather, on the other hand, believed such "spectral evidence" was entirely valid.
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The Biblical geologist Phillip Henry Gosse died on August 23, 1888. A key member of the Plymouth Brethren of Ireland and England, Gosse attempted to square the facts of geology with the Biblical flood account. (He was also the inventor of the indoor aquarium.) Gosse's fellow Plymouth Brethren included John Nelson Darby (the apocalypse-obsessed founder of the doctrine of "dispensationalism"), Scotland Yard criminal investigation chief Robert Anderson (a date-setting apocalypticist, and author of "The Coming Prince"), and Orde Charles Wingate (a paramilitary operative who left Britain for Palestine in the 1930s to promote the reestablishment of Israel).
The Plymouth Brethren movement has dwindled over time, but both Aleister Crowley and Garrison Keillor were raised within it.
