Most hymns built on a psalm take a verse or two and leave the rest. Johann Daniel Herrnschmidt (1675–1723) took all of Psalm 146. He was a professor of theology and vice-director of the Halle Foundations, the orphanage and schools at the heart of German Pietism, and his eight German stanzas work in nearly every idea the psalmist wrote, so that what we have, in the Companion’s phrase, is a versified commentary on one psalm. Pietist though he was, he did not miss why the psalm was written: Christ and His atoning work stand behind the line “pardon and peace from Him obtain.” On the day the Church remembers the beloved physician, it is worth noticing which psalm this is, the one that praises the God who heals all diseases and lifts up those bowed down. Herrnschmidt built his text on the frame of Leonhard Sturm’s paraphrase of Psalm 150, and the tune was revised from Sturm’s. It first appeared in Freylinghausen’s great Halle hymnal of 1714, and came into our books through Alfred Brauer’s translation and The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941. --- *From the The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity primer:* This hymn comes to us out of Halle, the beating heart of continental Pietism. Johann Daniel Hermschmidt (1675–1723) wrote it as an eighteenth-century paraphrase of Psalm 146 in eight German stanzas, Lobe den Herren, o meine Seele, and it was first printed in 1714 in the enormously influential hymnal compiled by Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen. The tune was adapted from an earlier melody by Leonhard Sturm, written for a paraphrase of Psalm 150; one hymnologist notes that it is perhaps a challenge to learn for anyone who has never heard it, but once learned it is unforgettable. The English text we sing rests chiefly on Alfred Brauer's translation for the Australian Lutheran Hymn Book of 1922. A rival English version of all eight stanzas by J. C. von der Au of Hamilton, Ontario, described as a more "slavish" rendering, ran in The Lutheran Witness in 1928. Our hymnal trims and reassembles the original: stanzas 4 and 7 are omitted, and a new stanza 4 was woven from the first half of the German stanza 5 and the second half of stanza 6.