Laudator Temporis Acti

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), "To the Puritan All Things Are Impure," Music at Night and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949; rpt. 1957), pp. 173-183 (at 173):

Mrs. Grundy resembles the King and that infernal worm of the Bible — she cannot die. La Grundy est morte. Vive la Grundy! There is no getting rid of her; she is immortal and succumbs only to be reborn.

Id. (at 176-177):

Our vice-crusaders and Home Secretaries were doubtless brought up in surroundings where an improper word, an over-frank reference in Saxon phrases to the processes of reproduction and evacuation (notice how perfectly respectable these homely acts become when shrouded in the decent obscurity of a learned language!), was accompanied, not by anything so mild as the tinkling of a bell, but by appalling silences, by the blushing or swooning away of maiden aunts, by the sadly pious horror or Jehovahistic indignation of clergymen and schoolmasters. So that to this day they cannot hear these words or read these descriptions without at once recapturing (the process is as automatic as the salivation of Pavlov’s dogs) the painful emotions aroused in them during childhood by the portentous accompaniments and consequences of what I have called sexual blasphemy.

Id. (at 178):

The epochs of highest civilization have been conspicuously unpuritanical. It was to the naked Aphrodite that the Greeks of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. made sacrifice, not to the much-petticoated divinity worshipped by the Pilgrim Fathers, by the later Podsnap and our contemporary Vice Crusaders and Home Secretaries. Seen through the eyes of the philosophic historian, the Puritan reveals himself as the most abnormal sexual pervert of whom we have record, while Grundyism stands out as the supremely unnatural vice.