In his (William Rufus’) days was founded the Cistercian order, which is now believed and alleged to provide the surest path to Heaven. To speak of this here is not irrelevant to the work I have undertaken, since it is England’s glory to have bred the man who was at once the founder and the organizer of this rule. To us he belongs, and in our schools as a boy he passed his early years. Therefore, if we are without envy, we shall the more gratefully cherish his worth, the more intimately we learn of it; at the same time I am myself disposed to sing loud his praises, because it is a noble trait to approve in others those qualities, the lack of which in yourself you regret. Harding was his name among the English, and he was born of no very illustrious parentage. In early youth he was a monk at Sherborne, but when, as he grew up, worldly desires troubled him, disgusted with his cloth, he went first to Scotland and afterwards to France. There, after some years education in the humanities, he felt the prickings of the love of God, for, after his manhood had put away childish follies, he went to Rome with a clerk, his fellow-student; neither the length nor the difficulty of the journey, nor their poverty, could restrain them from chanting daily the whole psalter as they went and returned. Already, indeed, the renowned man was meditating at heart the purpose which by God’s grace he began to execute soon after; returning to Burgundy, he received the tonsure in Molesme, a new and great monastery, and readily acknowledged the first principles of the rule, as he had formerly seen them; but when other observances were proposed to him which he had neither read in the rule nor ever seen, he began to press for the reason of the same, humbly and as becomes a monk.... His opinions, spreading, as happens, from one to another, justly moved the hearts of such as feared God, lest perchance they should run or had run in vain. The question, therefore, was debated in many chapters, and ended in the agreement of the abbot himself that superfluous observances should be given up and only the essential principles followed. Thereupon two of the brethren were chosen, of equal learning and piety, to enquire by vicarious research touching the will of the founder of the rule, and to expound the results of their enquiry to the others. The abbot strove earnestly to obtain the consent of the whole convent, but it is difficult to uproot from men’s minds old habits of thought, since they are reluctant to eschew what they have earliest digested; so well-nigh all refused to accept the new doctrine, because they loved the old. Only eighteen, among whom was Harding (who is also called Stephen), persisted in their holy determination, and left the community with their abbot, declaring that the rule could not be observed in its purity in a place where the soul, in spite of struggle, was overwhelmed by wealth and gluttony. So they came to Cîteaux, a place once simple