CHAPTER V
OF TRIBULATION
When the fiend sees one man out of
thousands perfectly turned to God; following the steps of Christ; despising
this present world; loving and seeking only the things unseen; taking perfect
penance; and purging himself from all filth of mind and body: he devises a
thousand beguilings of annoyance and a thousand crafts of fighting to cast him
from the love of God to the love of the world, and to fill him again with the
filth of sin so that at the least with lecherous thoughts he should be made
hateful to God. He raises against him persecution, tribulation, slander, false
blame for sins, and all kinds of hatred; so that pain may slay and break him
that prosperity could not beguile.
Now sharpness, now cherishing, he puts before
him, and he brings to mind images of bodily things; he gathers together
fantasies of sin; he gaincalls old shrewdness and delights of past love; he
inflames heart and flesh with lecherous fire. He begins with the least but he
comes to the greatest flame of wickedness. And with as great busyness he
studies to blow against us all kinds of temptation, tormentry and tribulation,
as he sorrows that we, by the mercy of God, have escaped from his cheeks.
He seeks nothing but that he might depart us from
the unbodily embrace, sweetest and most chaste, of everlasting love; and
afterward defile us in the pit of wretchedness. That were more wretched for us
than I can tell.
Who can think his madness that from the
delicacies of kings would come down to swine's meat? And yet is he more mad
that forsakes the delicious meat of unwrought wisdom and puts himself under the
filth of the flesh. Is not gluttony and lechery swinish filth, and they that do
such, feed they not fiends?
Therefore how we must do against the tribulation
and temptations of our enemies, and how to gainstand, shall patience teach us;
of which now we will speak.