Encamped along the hills of light,
Ye Christian soldiers, rise,
And press the battle ere the night
Shall veil the glowing skies.
Faith is the victory! Faith is the victory!
Oh, glorious victory,
That overcomes the world.
His banner over us is love,
Our sword the Word of God;
We tread the road the saints above
With shouts of triumph trod.
On every hand the foe we find
Drawn up in dread array;
Let tents of ease be left behind,
And onward to the fray.
Public domain hymn text (published 1891). Words by John H. Yates.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John H. Yates was a Congregational lay preacher and hymn writer working in New York State during the later decades of the 1800s, and he built this hymn's text and title directly around 1 John 5:4 — 'this is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith' — deliberately treating the entire Christian life throughout the hymn's verses in the explicit, sustained language of active spiritual warfare and decisive military conquest, rather than reaching for the gentler, more purely comforting imagery found in many other gospel hymns of the same general period.
Ira Sankey, already responsible elsewhere in this collection for the now-famous tune of 'The Ninety and Nine' (hymn 62), composed the matching tune for this hymn as well, and the resulting combined hymn quickly became closely associated with the large-scale urban revival campaigns that Sankey led together with evangelist D. L. Moody across both Britain and America throughout the 1870s and 1880s, commonly sung as a rousing, deliberately march-like congregational anthem specifically intended to instill confidence, resolve, and a sense of collective spiritual momentum in congregations who were, during this same historical period, increasingly confronting the era's fierce and highly public intellectual debates over the basic truth and continued relevance of Christianity itself, debates driven in considerable part by the rising cultural influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory and biblical higher criticism during exactly this same era.
The hymn's repeated, insistent affirmation that faith itself — rather than raw personal strength, cleverness, wealth, or simple good fortune — functions as the single decisive factor genuinely capable of overcoming ongoing spiritual struggle and doubt reflects a broader unifying theme found consistently across much of the wider gospel-song repertoire produced throughout this specific period: a deliberate, sustained emphasis on simple, confident, largely unreflective trust as fully sufficient preparation for facing any hardship whatsoever, standing in fairly deliberate stylistic and theological contrast to the considerably more anxious, introspective, and doctrinally elaborate styles of earlier English and American hymnody that had generally preceded this particular late-nineteenth-century gospel-song movement.
