forty-five years of age, this would throw his sixteenth year, when he was taken captive, to the first decade of the century, when the Roman province was exposed to the incursions of the Scots, and thus he must have himself already laboured as a missionary among the Irish people, to whom Palladius was sent as their first bishop. Such is the account which Patrick gives of himself in these documents, which we accept as undoubtedly genuine; and we shall see how, at a later period, this simple narrative became incrusted with a mass of traditional, legendary, and fictitious matter, which had gradually accumulated in the minds of the people, and was brought into shape and added from time to time to the story of Saint Patrick’s life and labours by each successive biographer. Patrick states in his Confession simply that he ordained clerics, but we are told in the Catalogue of the Saints that ‘they were all bishops, famous and holy, and full of the Holy Ghost, 350 in number, founders of churches;’ and this is confirmed by Angus the Culdee, in his Litany, where he invokes ‘seven times fifty holy bishops, with three hundred priests, whom Patraic ordained,’ and quotes the verse— ‘Seven times fifty holy cleric bishops[42] The saint ordained, With three hundred pure presbyters[43] Upon whom he conferred orders.’ Upwards of one half of his clergy seem, therefore, to have been bishops, and he appears to have placed a bishop, consecrated by himself, in each church which he founded. The difference in order between bishop and presbyter is here fully recognised; and there was nothing in this very inconsistent with the state of the primitive church before it became a territorial church, and its hierarchical arrangements and jurisdiction were adapted to and modelled upon the civil government of the Roman empire.[44] In the earlier period of the Christian Church there was, besides the chief bishop in each city, whose consecration required the action of at least three bishops, an order of ‘Chorepiscopi,’ or country bishops,[45] who were consecrated by the chief bishop; and the relative proportion of bishops and presbyters was very different from what it afterwards became. We find in the Apostolical Constitutions in the ordinances of the church of Alexandria that ‘if there should be a place having a few faithful men in it, before the multitude increase, who shall be able to make a dedication to pious uses for the bishop to the extent of twelve men, let them write to the churches round about the place, in which the multitude of believers are established. If the bishop whom they shall appoint hath attended to the knowledge and patience of the love of God, with those with him, let him ordain two presbyters when he hath examined them, or rather three;’[46] and we are told that in Asia Minor alone there were upwards of four hundred bishops.[47] Such a church as this could not have been very unlike the