RESOLUTION IX.

Thanksgiving-day or Harvest-home.

The only alteration needed in this office is the restoration of the beautiful prayer for unity to its own proper wording as given in the so-called "Accession Service" appended to the English Prayer Book. As it stands in The Book Annexed the language of the prayer is possibly ungrammatical and certainly redundant. A critic, already more than once quoted,[87] protests against the prominence given to this office in The Book Annexed, ascribing it to influences born of the associations of New England. But although the motive of the revisers might have had a worse origin than that of which the reviewer complains, the actual fact is that the formulary was placed where it is purely in consideration of the liturgical fitness of things; it having been held that the proper position for an Office of Thanksgiving must be in immediate sequence to an Office of Penitence.

It is with sincere diffidence that the present writer differs with The Seminarian, on a point of historical precedent, but he ventures to suggest that to find the prototype of Harvest-home we must go back far beyond New England, and for that matter far beyond Old England, nay, beyond the Christian era itself, even to the day when it was said, "Thou shalt observe the Feast of Tabernacles, seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine." Doubtless there is a joy greater than the "joy of harvest," and to this we give expression in the Eucharist; but doubtless also the joy of harvest is in itself a proper joy and one which finds fitting utterance in such forms of prayer and praise as this.