the.com/godliness

means The quality of being devoutly good, virtuous, and reverent toward God — moral purity treated as a life practice, not just a feeling.

from Built from 'godly' plus the suffix '-ness,' which turns a quality into an abstract noun. 'Godly' itself goes back to Old English 'godlic' — literally 'god-like' — the same -lic ending that gives us 'ly' words generally (friendly, lovely). The phrase most people actually know it from, 'cleanliness is next to godliness,' isn't from scripture at all — it traces to 18th-century sermonizing (popularly linked to John Wesley) that yoked scrubbed hands to a scrubbed soul, a pairing that stuck far harder than the theology behind it.