Lyrics
There's a royal banner given for display
To the soldiers of the King;
As an ensign fair we lift it up today,
While as ransomed ones we sing.
Marching on, marching on,
For Christ count everything but loss!
And to crown Him king, we'll toil and sing,
'Neath the banner of the cross!
Though the foe may rage and gather as the flood,
Let the standard be displayed;
And beneath its folds, as soldiers of the Lord,
For the truth be not dismayed!
Over land and sea, wherever man may dwell,
Make the glorious tidings known;
Of the crimson banner now the story tell,
While the Lord shall claim His own!
When the glory dawns — 'tis drawing very near,
It is hastening day by day —
Then before our king the foe shall disappear,
And the cross the world shall sway!
Public domain hymn text (1884) and tune, based on Psalm 60:4.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Daniel W. Whittle wrote "The Banner of the Cross" in 1884, and it first appeared in print the following year in The Gospel Choir, a collection edited by Ira D. Sankey and James McGranahan. McGranahan, who composed the tune, had by then been Whittle's regular musical partner for several years, having taken over as song leader for Whittle's evangelistic campaigns after the death of Philip P. Bliss in the Ashtabula train disaster of 1876.
The Whittle-McGranahan partnership produced a number of the era's most durable gospel songs, and "The Banner of the Cross" sits among them as one of its more overtly militant entries — a hymn of marching and standards and banners, drawing its title image from Psalm 60:4: "Thou hast given a banner to them that fear Thee, that it may be displayed because of the truth."
Whittle's own history as a Union Army officer during the Civil War, where he served and was seriously wounded, may explain why this particular hymn leans so naturally on martial imagery — soldiers, standards, foes gathering like a flood — even as its actual concern, stated plainly across all four verses, is spiritual rather than physical: a battle for souls fought under Christ, the true commander, rather than any earthly cause.
The hymn's final verse looks forward rather than backward, anticipating a day when "the foe shall disappear, and the cross the world shall sway" — less a hymn of present conflict than one of confident expectation, marching not toward a battlefield but toward an outcome Whittle considered already settled.
