"ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 145, 2 April 1942, Page 12

"ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS"

ey Washington comes a report that Representative Louis Ludlow moved a joint resolution to make "Onward Christian Soldiers" the United States National Song. American soldiers have marched in the past to the words, if not the tunes, of hymns, so it is perhaps not surprising that a hymn should have been suggested as a rallying cry for the United States army to-day. The majestic "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord" is probably still too closely associated with divisions of the past. "Onward Christian Soldiers’ was, however, not written originally as a national or even a martial song. It was composed by the Rev. Baring-Gould-who incidentally is said to have his name attached to more works in the British Museum than that of any other author of his day-for his Sunday. School children’s Whit Monday procession in 1865. Their route from one village to another was long forthe little children,\so he fitted his words to a march tune taken from a Haydn Symphony, in the hope that the singing would make the distance seem shorter. Written as it was for this purpose the lines "We are not divided All one body we" ~ were appropriate, but when the hymn came to be sung far and wide, BaringGould felt that the words were, unhappily, inaccurate. So he substituted "Though divisions harass All one body we." (the reading to be found in Hymns Ancient and Modern) thus sacrificing smoothness of rhythm to truth.

The popularity of this hymn owes much to’ Sullivan’s tune "St. Gertrude," named after and dedicated to a woman at whose house he was staying when he wrote it. "It is a curious fact," wrote Sullivan ‘once of this tune, "that one of my best known hymn. tunes was written as the result of a quarrel between the proprietors of Hymns Ancient and Modern and the firm of " Novello."