George Fox however was not the first of the religious writers, who had
noticed the improper use of the pronoun you. Erasmus employed a treatise
in shewing the propriety of thou when addressed to a single person, and
in ridiculing the use of you on the same occasion. Martin Luther also
took great pains to expunge the word you from the station which it
occupied, and to put thou in its place. In his Ludus, he ridicules the
use of the former by the, following invented sentence, "Magister,
Vosestis iratus?" This is as absurd, as if he had said in English
"gentlemen art thou angry"?
But though George Fox was not the first to recommend the substitution of
thou for you, he was the first to reduce this amended use of it to
practice. This he did in his own person, wherever he went, and in all
the works which he published. All his followers did the same. And, from
his time to the present, the pronoun thou has come down so prominent in
the speech of the society, that a Quaker is generally known by it at the
present day.
The reader would hardly believe, if historical facts did not prove it,
how much noise the introduction or rather the amended use of this little
particle, as reduced to practice by George Fox, made in the world, and
how much ill usage it occasioned the early Quakers.
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