_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.