Sabine Baring Gould "Famous Hymnal Poem 'Onward Christian Soldiers'

Autograph Manuscript Of His Famous Hymnal Poem 'Onward Christian Soldiers', signed at the end ('S. Baring-Gould'), 40 lines in five eight-line stanzas, 1 page, folio. Framed with an incredible frame museum mounted.

'Onward Christian Soldiers
Marching as to War,
With the Cross of Jesus
Going on before...'

The hymn was written by the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould in 1865, when he was a curate at Horbury St Peter's Church near Wakefield, Yorkshire. He scribbled the hymn down the night before a school Whit Day Festival for the children to sing as they walked.
Little did he know that it would go on to become one of the best loved hymns in the English language

Baring-Gould wrote the lyrics to the melody from the slow movement of Haydn's Symphony No 15, but it was truly cemented in church tradition when Sir Arthur Sullivan - of Gilbert and Sullivan - wrote a new tune for the hymn in 1871.It was later taken up by The Salvation Army as a processional.

The song has been used in many important occasions through the years from presidential funerals, to even when Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met in 1941 on the battleship HMS Prince of Wales to agree the Atlantic Charter, a church service was held for which Prime Minister Churchill chose the hymns. He chose "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and afterwards made a radio broadcast explaining this choice.

We sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers" indeed, and I felt that this was no vain presumption, but that we had the right to feel that we serving a cause for the sake of which a trumpet has sounded from on high. When I looked upon that densely packed congregation of fighting men of the same language, of the same faith, of the same fundamental laws, of the same ideals ... it swept across me that here was the only hope, but also the sure hope, of saving the world from measureless degradation.
—Winston Churchill

Extremely Rare can only find one other complete Handwritten and signed poem which sold for over $11,000 in Bonhams Auctions in London.

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