OBS. 6.—­The general usage of the French is like that of the English, you for thou; but Spanish, Portuguese, or German politeness requires that the third person be substituted for the second.  And when they would be very courteous, the Germans use also the plural for the singular, as they for thou.  Thus they have a fourfold method of addressing a person:  as, they, denoting the highest degree of respect; he, a less degree; you, a degree still less; and thou, none at all, or absolute reproach.  Yet, even among them, the last is used as a term of endearment to children, and of veneration to God! Thou, in English, still retains its place firmly, and without dispute, in all addresses to the Supreme Being; but in respect to the first person, an observant clergyman has suggested the following dilemma:  “Some men will be pained, if a minister says we in the pulpit; and others will quarrel with him, if he says I.”—­Abbott’s Young Christian, p. 268.

OBS. 7.—­Any extensive perversion of the common words of a language from their original and proper use, is doubtless a matter of considerable moment.  These changes in the use of the pronouns, being some of them evidently a sort of complimentary fictions, some religious people have made it a matter of conscience to abstain from them, and have published their reasons for so doing.  But the moral objections which may lie against such or any other applications of words, do not come within the grammarian’s province.  Let every one consider for himself the moral bearing of what he utters:  not forgetting the text, “But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement:  for by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.”—­Matt., xii, 36 and 37.  What scruples this declaration ought to raise, it is not my business to define.  But if such be God’s law, what shall be the reckoning of those who make no conscience of uttering continually, or when they will, not idle words only, but expressions the most absurd, insignificant, false, exaggerated, vulgar, indecent, injurious, wicked, sophistical, unprincipled, ungentle, and perhaps blasphemous, or profane?

OBS. 8.—­The agreement of pronouns with their antecedents, it is necessary to observe, is liable to be controlled or affected by several of the figures of rhetoric.  A noun used figuratively often suggests two different senses, the one literal, and the other tropical; and the agreement of the pronoun must be sometimes with this, and sometimes with that, according to the nature of the trope.  If the reader be unacquainted with tropes and figures, he should turn to the explanation of them in Part Fourth of this work; but almost every one knows something about them, and such as must here be named, will perhaps be made sufficiently intelligible by the examples.  There seems to be no occasion to introduce under this head more than four; namely, personification, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche.