Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (Battle Hymn of the Republic) | by Julia Ward Howe | July 4, 2024

Hi, in honor of July 4th, Independence Day in the US, we are singing Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. What a wonderful song to sing today. It has a military march to it, yet it speaks of the greatness of God.

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory was written by Julia Ward Howe in 1862.

"She became famous as the author of the poem entitled "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which, in spite of its title, was written as a patriotic song and not as a hymn for use in public worship, but which has been included in many American hymn books. It was written on November 19, 1861, while she and her husband, accompanied by their pastor, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, minister of the (Unitarian) Church of the Disciples, Boston, were visiting Washington soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. She had seen the troops gathered there and had heard them singing "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave" to a popular tune called "Glory, Hallelujah" composed a few years earlier by William Steffe of Charleston, South Carolina, for Sunday School use. Dr. Clarke asked Julie Howe if she could not write more uplifting words for the tune and as she woke early the next morning she found the verses forming in her mind as fast as she could write them down, so completely that later she re-wrote only a line or two in the last stanza and changed only four words in other stanzas. She sent the poem to The Atlantic Monthly, which paid her $4 and published it in its issue for February, 1862. It attracted little attention until it caught the eye of Chaplain C. C. McCable (later a Methodist bishop) who had a fine singing voice and who taught it first to the 122nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry regiment to which he was attached, then to other troops, and to prisoners in Libby Prison after he was made a prisoner of war. Thereafter it quickly came into use throughout the North as an expression of the patriotic emotion of the period."
(https://hymnary.org/person/Howe_Julia)

Here are the lyrics:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

Refrain:
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read the righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on. [Refrain]

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of all before his judgment seat;
O be swift, my soul, to answer him; be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on. [Refrain]

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me;
As he died to make us holy, let us die that all be free!
While God is marching on. [Refrain]