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Stanley Abbey. 
By the Rey. Canon Epprvp. 
F Stanley Abbey, though of royal foundation, the buildings 
have entirely disappeared; but its history carries us back 
ue ue far past, and for those who care to remember bygone times 
interesting associations linger round the site. 
Stanley Abbey was one of the many Cistercian abbeys in England. 
Who were the Cistercians? They were an offshoot of the Bene- 
dictines, and take their name from Cistercium, now modernized into 
Citeaux, in Burgundy, near the borders of Champagne, where in 
the eleventh century was founded a small monastery by some Bene- 
dictine monks, eager to follow out the austere rules of their order in 
more full and complete strictness than they found possible in their 
own monastery at Molesme. “ Nothing could appear more stubborn, 
more dismal, more hopeless than this spot : it suited their rigid mood : 
they had more than once the satisfaction of almost perishing by 
famine.” ! The date regarded as the foundation of the Cistercians is 
March 21st (St. Benedict’s Day), 1098. The Cistercians ever after- 
wards chose lonely and retired places for their monasteries. The first 
abbot and nominal founder of the order was Robert de Molesme: 
the real founder, Stephen Harding, an Englishman of a good and 
_ wealthy family, who had been brought up in the monastery at 
- Sherborne in Dorsetshire. Stephen, or Saint Stephen (April 17th), 
_ to give him his full title, is said to have been not only a very devout 
but a learned man, and to have taken great pains to make for his 
monks a correct copy of the Bible, for which he consulted many 
learned Jews on the Hebrew text. But the Cistercians, notwith- 
standing the strictness of their asceticism, would never, as far as we 
can judge, have reached the fame and influence which they soon 
| obtained, had it not been that some fifteen years after this, in 1113, 
1 Milman’s Latino Christianity, viii, iv., vol. iii,, p. 226. 
