George Fox seemed to look at every custom with the eye of a reformer.
The language of the country, as used in his own times, struck him as
having many censurable defects. Many of the expressions, then in use,
appeared to him to contain gross flattery, others to be idolatrous,
others to be false representatives of the ideas they were intended to
convey. Now he considered that christianity required truth, and he
believed therefore that he and his followers, who professed to be
christians in word and deed, and to follow the christian pattern in all
things, as far as it could be found, were called upon to depart from all
the censurable modes of speech, as much as they were from any of the
customs of the world, which Christianity had deemed objectionable. And
so weightily did these improprieties in his own language lie upon his
mind, that he conceived himself to have had an especial commission to
correct them.
The first alteration, which he adopted, was in the use of the pronoun
thou. The pronoun you, which grammarians had fixed to be of the plural
number, was then occasionally used, but less than it is now, in
addressing an individual. George Fox therefore adopted thou in its place
on this occasion, leaving the word you to be used only where two or more
individuals were addressed.
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