Lyrics
Sing praise to God who reigns above,
The God of all creation,
The God of power, the God of love,
The God of our salvation;
With healing balm my soul is filled,
And every faithless murmur stilled:
To God all praise and glory!
The Lord is never far away,
But through all grief distressing,
An ever-present help and stay,
Our peace and joy and blessing;
As with a mother's tender hand,
He leads His own, His chosen band:
To God all praise and glory!
Thus all my toilsome way along
I sing aloud His praises,
That all may hear the grateful song
My voice unwearied raises;
Be joyful in the Lord, my heart;
Both soul and body bear your part:
To God all praise and glory!
Let all who name Christ's holy name
Give God all praise and glory;
Let all who own His power proclaim
Aloud the wondrous story!
Cast each false idol from its throne,
For Christ is Lord, and Christ alone:
To God all praise and glory!
Public domain hymn text. Original German words by Johann J. Schütz, 1675; English translation by Catherine Winkworth.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Johann Jakob Schütz was born in 1640 in Frankfurt, Germany. Unlike most hymn writers of his era, he was not a clergyman but a practicing lawyer.
He moved in the same reforming circles as Philipp Jakob Spener, the Lutheran pastor whose 1675 book ‘Pia Desideria’ is generally regarded as the founding document of Pietism. That movement pushed back against what its adherents saw as a Lutheran church grown too focused on doctrinal correctness, and too little concerned with heartfelt, lived faith.
Schütz wrote this hymn the very same year Spener’s book appeared. Its confident, personal tone — praising God’s care not abstractly but as something felt directly, ‘within my soul’ — reflects that same Pietist emphasis on devotion as something experienced, rather than merely believed.
The hymn remained within German-speaking Lutheran and Pietist circles for close to two centuries, before reaching English-speaking congregations. It was carried across that gap by one of the nineteenth century’s most important hymn translators, Catherine Winkworth.
Born in England in 1827, Winkworth became fluent in German during time spent in Dresden. She devoted much of her adult life to translating German hymnody into English verse that could actually be sung, not merely read — a much harder task than plain translation, since it required matching meter and rhyme while preserving the original meaning.
Winkworth published this translation in her 1858 collection ‘Lyra Germanica.’ That volume introduced English and American congregations to a wealth of German Lutheran and Pietist hymnody they would otherwise never have encountered, since few English-speaking worshippers of the era read German.
The collection proved enormously influential, and several of her translations, including this one, became permanent fixtures of English-language hymnals.
Winkworth was also an active advocate for women’s education in England, working to expand educational opportunities for women and girls alongside her literary and translation work.
That is a reminder that many of the era’s most significant hymn translators were engaged in public work well beyond the hymnal.
The hymn is commonly sung to a tune drawn from the 1566 hymnal of the Bohemian Brethren — an even older source than Schütz’s own text.
That gives the finished hymn, as sung today, a layered history spanning more than three centuries and three distinct European Protestant traditions, before it ever reached an English-speaking congregation.
