distance of time from ours,--nay, seem as old as a sense of joy for the
benefit of plentiful harvests and human gratitude to the eternal Creator
for His munificence to men. We hear it under various names in different
counties, and often in the same county; as, "melsupper," "churn-supper,"
"harvest-supper," "harvesthome," "feast of in-gathering," etc. And
perhaps this feast had been long observed, and by different tribes of
people, before it became preceptive with the Jews. However, let that be
as it will, the custom very lucidly appears from the following passages
of S. S., Exod. xxiii. 16, "And the feast of harvest, the first-fruits of
thy labors, which thou hast sown in the field." And its institution as a
sacred rite is commanded in Levit. xxiii. 39: "When ye have gathered in
the fruit of the land ye shall keep a feast to the Lord."

The Jews then, as is evident from hence, celebrated the feast of harvest,
and that by precept; and though no vestiges of any such feast either are
or can be produced before these, yet the oblation of the Primitae, of
which this feast was a consequence, is met with prior to this, for we
find that "Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering to the
Lord" (Gen. iv. 3).

Yet this offering of the first-fruits, it may well be supposed was not
peculiar to the Jews either at the time of, or after, its establishment
by their legislator; neither the feast in consequence of it. Many other
nations, either in imitation of the Jews, or rather by tradition from
their several patriarchs, observed the rite of offering their Primitiae,
and of solemnizing a festival after it, in religious acknowledgment for
the blessing of harvest, though that acknowledgment was ignorantly
misapplied in being directed to a secondary, not the primary, fountain of
this benefit,--namely to Apollo, or the Sun.