thout failing, sovereign
wisdom, light, soothness without error or darkness; sovereign
goodness, love, peace, and sweetness. Then the more that a soul is
united, fastened, conformed, and joined to our Lord, the more stable
and mighty it is, the more wise and clear, good and peaceable,
loving and more virtuous it is, and so it is more perfect. For a
soul that hath by the grace of Jesu, and long travail of bodily and
ghostly exercise, overcome and destroyed concupiscences, and
passions, and unskilful stirrings[158] within itself, and without in
the sensuality, and is clothed all in virtues, as in meekness and
mildness, in patience and softness, in ghostly strength and
righteousness, in continence, in wisdom, in truth, hope and charity;
then it is made perfect, as it may be in this life. Much comfort it
receiveth of our Lord, not only inwardly in its own privy
substance,[159] by virtue of the onehead to our Lord that lieth in
knowing and loving of God, in light and ghostly brenning of Him, in
transforming of the soul in to the Godhead; but also many other
comforts, savours, sweetnesses, and wonderful feelings on sere[160]
or sundry manners, after that our Lord vouchethsafe to visit His
creatures here in earth, and after that the soul profiteth and
waxeth in charity. Some soul, by virtue of charity that God giveth
it, is so cleansed, that all creatures, and all that he heareth, or
seeth, or feeleth by any of his wits, turneth him to comfort and
gladness; and the sensuality receiveth new savour and sweetness in
all creatures.[161] And right as beforetime the likings in the
sensuality were fleshly, vain, and vicious, for the pain of the
original sin; right so now they are made ghostly and clean, without
bitterness and biting of conscience. And this is the goodness of our
Lord, that sith the soul is punished in the sensuality, and the
flesh is partner of the pain, that afterward the soul be comforted
in the sensuality, and the flesh be fellow of joy and comfort with
the soul, not fleshly, but ghostly, as he was fellow in tribulation
and pain. This is the freedom and the lordship, the dignity, and the
worship that a man[162] hath over all creatures, the which dignity
he may so recover by grace here, that every creature savour to him
as it is. And that is, when by grace he seeth, he heareth, he
feeleth only God in all creatures. On this manner of wise a soul is
made ghostly in the sensuality by abundance of charity, that is, in