The Church Goes Marching On

Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord:
In a chapel, there's a choir singing like a well-tuned Ford
They are trampling out the vintage where the grapes of song are stored.
(Two-thirds of them look happy and the other third looks bored.)
In their dresses and the suit coats, every one looks rather smart
And some are hiding bubble gum, and some a broken heart.
If you could see within the souls where faith still strives with doubt
There would be deeper meaning in the cadence of their shout;
Some have found at last the purity that's stronger than all lust,
And some within their poverty have shared a sacred crust.
Fragments of eternal song, without reason, without rhyme
Which never should have touched within the kaleidoscope of time
But now within this chapel, they are joined here in a chord
Fused by the fateful lightning of God's terrible swift sword,
And the church goes marching on.

I've seen them in the fires of a hundred watching camps
At circling alters sealed by God for saints, for souls, for scamps,
They have raised a prayer together through evening dews and damps
And preached a gospel message through archaic kinds of amps.
I have seen them in cathedrals, made of stone as cold as night
Where the words of God glow gladly when the glass is touched by light,
And some in wooden chapels, formed by honest oaken board
As if the tree of life replanted from the garden of the Lord,
And some are camped in storefronts, where peeling papers droop,
Or in kitchens where the word of God is spelled out in the soup,
Some have preached in palaces, and some have preached in jail,
Some within the sacred silence of the forest's green dell
And some beneath the shadows of the north and south-bound ramps
Where they read God's righteous sentence by the flickering street lamps
And the church goes marching on.

With the beauty of a lily Christ born across the sea,
In a dirty, crowded stable filled stench and poverty,
But the beauty of that birth still brings new birth to you and me
And to all the world that's touched by that Baby's sovereignty.
For that birth upturned the power of all the powers that there be
And the whole wide world has risen too in His ascendency,
For lowest corner now is shining with a strange divinity
And eyes of men are dazzled when the Son of Man they see;
Let every man take heart, then, and raid God's armory
Where angels tread with fearing marches now humanity
Through heavenly portals opened by the Son of David's key,
With the banners of that last defeat which is God's victory--
As He died to make men holy, so He lives to make us free
So from this moment to the far side of eternity
The church goes marching on.