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and Africa during the nineteenth century (and beyond). Many enthusiastic Christian evangelists found it natural to use the vocabulary of the “crusade,” which for them exemplified a spiritual war against evil. Hymnals and religious songbooks, such as Hymns Ancient and Modern (first published in 1861), were best sellers by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and many people knew the words and tunes of the most popular hymns by heart.43 These hymns exhorted the faithful to “Fight the good fight / With all thy might” (John S. B. Monsell, 1863), or to see themselves as soldiers in God’s cause. The most successful of these calls to action was “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to War / With the Cross of Jesus, going on before” (1865), written by the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould because he “wanted the children to sing when marching from one village to another, but couldn’t think of anything quite suitable; so I sat up at night, resolved that I would write something myself. ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ was the result.”44

Gradually, the common meaning of “crusade” in the English language became a metaphor for a sustained and powerful action in a good cause.45 But the older sense of the cross and holy war was still a potent symbol. Nor was the specific enmity to Muslims completely lost. I remember singing at school a hymn by J. E. Neale, which had been popular since first published a century before. Neale had reworked a text by Andrew of Crete.

Christian, dost thou see them

On the holy ground?

How the troops of Midian

Prowl and prowl around?

Christian, up and smite them,

Counting gain but loss;

Smite them by the merit

Of the holy cross.

I wondered idly at the time who the “troops of Midian” might be. It was only much later that I discovered that the hymn’s author would have known “Midianites” as a synonym for Arabs or “Saracens.”46 And plainly, the “holy ground” for Andrew of Crete was Jerusalem and the Christian sites of the Levant—in Neale’s day under the rule of the Ottomans.

However, Neale’s usage was atypical, and he later produced a more anodyne version. The “troops of Midian” were transmuted into “the powers of darkness.” Perhaps he considered this more appropriate to the mission fields? Likewise, “infidel,” which had still been in use in the early nineteenth century, fell out of favor with hymn writers.47 “Heathen lands” and “pagan darkness” replaced the wastelands of the infidel. Perhaps “infidel” was too precisely associated with Mediterranean Islam? However, in 1911, Robert Mitchell returned directly to the language of “crusade” in its original bellicose sense:

Hark to the call of the New Crusade,

Christ over all will King be made;

Out to the world let the challenge ring:

Make Christ King!

His refrain elaborated the theme:

Hail to the King of kings! Triumphant Redeemer!

On march the soldiers of the New Crusade.

This is the battle cry: Christ made the King!

And to our Sov’reign we allegiance bring;

Prince, Guide and Counsellor He shall be.

Carry the standard to victory!

Hail to the call of the New Crusade:

Make Christ King!

Strong is the foe of the New Crusade,

Sin in its armour is well arrayed;

Into the fight we our best must fling:

Make Christ King!

There were hundreds of missionaries to the Holy Land at the time that Mitchell wrote, but the big battalions of evangelism directed their attention elsewhere.48 Nevertheless, the essential terminology of “crusade” and conquest remained a constant presence in Christian discourse and activity.49

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicals crusaded, as they believed, for a spiritual victory, not for territorial conquest. But the word does not allow so facile a separation. This ambiguity between a holy war in a spiritual sense and a victory over the temporal forces of darkness had a long pedigree. Two seventeenth-century near contemporaries, John Bunyan and Thomas Fuller, both wrote books entitled The Holy War. Bunyan’s allegorical intentions were clear from this title: The Holy War Made by Shaddai upon Diabolus for the Regaining of