Rejoice With Them That Rejoice

Rejoice With Them That Rejoice is a sermon or short devotional work by Henry Alford, the English Anglican theologian, biblical scholar, and poet who lived from 1810 to 1871. Alford served as Dean of Canterbury Cathedral from 1857 until his death and was one of the major English biblical scholars of the mid Victorian period.

Alford’s principal scholarly contribution was his four volume edition of the Greek New Testament, first published between 1849 and 1861 and revised across the following decades. The edition combined a careful Greek text with substantial textual critical apparatus, exegetical commentary, and translation, and was widely used in English biblical scholarship across the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. The work brought the developments in German biblical scholarship of the early and mid nineteenth century into the English language and contributed substantially to the modernisation of English biblical studies.

Alongside his scholarly work Alford produced a substantial body of writing for general religious audiences. He wrote popular biblical commentaries, devotional books, sermons, and hymns. His most famous hymn was Come, Ye Thankful People, Come, the harvest festival hymn that he composed in 1844 and that has remained one of the most widely sung Anglican hymns for the season. The text of the hymn combines harvest imagery with the broader eschatological themes that Alford explored throughout his religious writing.

The sermon or short work Rejoice With Them That Rejoice takes its title from the verse in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul instructs the Roman Christians to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, as part of the broader practical ethical instruction that occupies the closing chapters of the epistle. Alford’s treatment likely combines exegetical work on the biblical text with the kind of pastoral application that the sermon genre called for, addressing the practical question of what it actually means to participate genuinely in the joys of other people rather than responding with the envy or distance that comes more naturally.

The work is of interest now to readers of mid Victorian Anglican preaching and devotional literature, particularly those interested in the broadly evangelical tradition within Victorian Anglicanism that Alford represented. It pairs naturally with his other devotional writings and with the broader mid Victorian Anglican sermon literature.