A General Thanksgiving

A few days ago when considering A Prayer for All Sorts of Men, I also realized that I had not really devoted a post to A General Thanksgiving.  This beloved prayer reads as follows:

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we, thine unworthy servants, do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and lovingkindness to us, and to all men; [* particularly to those who desire now to offer up their praises and thanksgivings for thy late mercies vouchsafed unto them.] We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

The wording of this prayer may have been influenced by earlier prayers, but the 1662 Book of Common Prayer included its present form. It was written by "conforming Puritan," Bishop Edward Reynolds. In 1662, it was placed among the Occasional Prayers section after the Litany, but the 1789 American BCP printed it in both Morning and Evening Prayer. The original phraseology, the paucity of capitalizations (compare the General Confession, the Lord's Prayer, the Creeds) and the punctuation do not easily promote unison recitation, but it became popular over the last century for the congregation to join in saying these words. The 1878 Irish BCP and the 1928 American BCP recognized this variation with rubrics

A General Thanksgiving praises and thanks God for natural and supernatural blessings, allowing for special circumstances by a parenthetical. It seems to echo I Timothy 2:1, Philippians 4:6, and Colossians 1:27 as well as other Scriptures. It focuses on the redeeming work of Jesus Christ and refers to the means of grace and Christian hope. Then there follows a petition that our thanks and praise may be sincere and expressed in our lives. This prayer is beautiful, meaningful, and appropriate for many contexts.