'The season of the year to which the good hand of our God has once more brought us round': an 1839 Old High harvest sermon

From a Harvest sermon preached by Old High William Jacobson (received orders in 1830, appointed Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford in 1848, appointed Bishop of Chester in 1865) in the parish church of Iffley, Oxford, in 1839:

All Thy works praise Thee, O Lord. These words we repeat in their course when we come to them in their place in the Psalms, with a sort of general notion that they are true; but when the Heavens are black with clouds and wind, when the voice of God's thunder is heard round about, and His lightnings shine upon the ground, then, indeed, we feel that His works are praising the power and majesty of God. Or, to take one other instance, when the vallies stand so thick with corn that they seem to laugh and sing, when it appears as though the clouds in months past had indeed dropped fatness, and when God is crowning the year with His goodness before our eyes; we feel then that the works of the Lord do indeed praise Him by setting forth the greatness and abundance of His mercy and goodness ... 

How often the works of God are made in Scripture not only to tell of His wisdom and power, as made known to us in the kingdom of His providence, but are also employed to illustrate the mysteries of the kingdom of His grace. Our Blessed Saviour Himself was constantly pleased to draw His lessons from surrounding nature. The fields which yet wanted four months to make them ready for the natural harvest, were employed by Him to explain to His disciples the near approach of that spiritual harvest in which they were to be employed as the first labourers. The lilies of the field, the sparrows on the housetop, the early sun-beams that gilded the pinnacles of the Temple, the vine that mantled the lattice of the room in which He spoke, all were called in by Him to inculcate confidence in the superintending providence of God, or to illustrate His own character and offices. The cloud rising out of the west, a red and lowering sunset, served to point His rebuke of the faithlessness and perversity of the generation among whom He sojourned. And thus it is that this world of ours, smitten though it be with a curse for the fall of man, is yet sanctified to the thoughts of the believer, who sees in everything around him something to remind him of that better country to which he is travelling.

Jacobson's sermon stands in a long tradition of Anglican harvest preaching which significantly pre-dated the supposed invention of Harvest Thanksgiving by Parson Hawker in 1843, and the Church of England's issuing of a Form of Thanksgiving for the Harvest in 1862. Across the 18th century, prayers of thanksgiving for harvest were published by authority, and harvest sermons were quite routine. Jacobson's 1839 sermon indicates how this continued into the Victoria era. 

The sermon's reference to the Psalmist - "when God is crowning the year with His goodness before our eyes" - echoes a phrase which appeared many times in 18th century Church of England provision. It had, no doubt, become deeply associated in pulpit and pew with yearly thanksgiving for the harvest, long before 1843 or 1862.

Jacobson's 1839 sermon suggests, therefore, that Harvest already had an existing deep resonance within the Church of England, which led to - rather than flowed from - Victorian observance. (And we should note in this context that PECUSA's BCP 1789 had 'A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God For the fruits of the earth, and all the other blessings of his merciful Providence', a provision similarly flowing from 18th century Anglican practice.)

This, Jacobson declared in his sermon, was the "season of the year to which the good hand of our God has once more brought us round", a time when "we feel then that the works of the Lord do indeed praise Him", when Autumn days and harvested fields are "sanctified to the thoughts of the believer, who sees in everything around him something to remind him of that better country to which he is travelling". Jacobson's evocative phrases are indeed suggestive of a well-established, resonant practice of Harvest Thanksgiving in 1839 - and of why Harvest Thanksgiving can continue to resonate in the early 21st century, as we too come to that "season of the year to which the good hand of our God has once more brought us round".