Isaac Watts (1674–1748) included this paraphrase of Psalm 103 in his landmark 1719 collection The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, under the heading "Praise for Spiritual and Temporal Mercies." Watts had grown impatient with the metrical psalms sung in the churches of his day, which he found rigidly literal and silent about Christ; his solution was to "Christianize the voice of David," setting aside specific Old Testament places and images in favor of language that spoke directly to the New Testament believer. That aim reaches its climax in the final stanza: where the psalm says the Lord "made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel" (v. 7), Watts widens the scope to the entire world, now shown God’s grace and truth through His Son (Hebrews 1:2). As the primer’s closing hymn, it gathers the congregation’s response to a Sunday of healing and thanksgiving into the same note struck by the psalm from the very start: bless the Lord, O my soul.