Purity, I fear, has gotten mixed up in people's minds with the caricature of Puritanism, which, in the popular imagination, is a dour, brittle revolt against all the pleasures of the flesh. Puritans were in fact very earthy people, robust in their affirmation of life, not by any means "Victorian" (another word grossly misunderstood today in being made a synonym for all that is negative).
Neither the concept of purity nor the doctrines of the Puritans deny life. Rather they refer back to the very Giver of Life Himself. Purity means freedom from contamination, from anything that would spoil the taste or the pleasure, reduce the power, or in any way adulterate what the thing was meant to be. It means cleanness, clearness - no additives, nothing artificial - in other words, "all natural," in the sense in which the Original Designer designed it to be.
- Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control
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