by Charles Moore, Spectator
I wish all the argument about pronouns had been raging when I was a teenager. That was the time when it first became commonplace to address God as ‘You’ in the liturgy and in translations of the Bible. I was against the change then because it sacrificed beauty, but I could never quite answer those who said it was better to speak to God less formally and more intimately. In my then ignorance, I did not know that ‘Thou’, as is the case with the second person singular in many other languages, was historically the more intimate and loving form, and so I did not understand that the plural ‘You’ was the more distant one. The use of ‘You’ is also theologically inaccurate, since it grammatically implies that there is more than one God. The Trinity, after all, are not some things. It is one thing.