Assuming that the three orders of the saints pictured the leading characteristics of three periods of the Irish Church, there can be no question that the great feature of the second period was its monastic character. The principal points of difference in the constitution of the Church represented by the first two orders were these:—The first order ‘was of Catholic saints,’ the second ‘of Catholic presbyters.’ In the first they are said to have been ‘all bishops, founders of Churches’; in the second there were ‘few bishops and many presbyters, in number 300.’ In the first ‘they had one head, Christ, and one chief, Patricius’; in the second ‘they had one head, our Lord,’ but no chief. In the first ‘they observed one mass, one celebration’; in the second ‘they celebrated different masses, and had different rules.’ In the first ‘they excluded from the churches neither laymen nor women’; in the second ‘they refused the services of women, separating them from the monasteries.’[80] The first, as we have said, exhibits a secular clergy founding churches; the second a clergy observing rules and founding monasteries. There were no doubt monasteries in the earlier church, and, as St. Patrick tells us in his Confession, ‘sons of the Scots and daughters of the princes are seen to be monks and virgins;’ but these were accidental features in a church essentially secular, and the monasteries were probably of the earliest type, when the monks were laymen, while the clergy, in common with the church at that period, consisted of bishops with their presbyters and deacons; but in the second period the entire church appears to have been monastic, and her whole clergy embraced within the fold of the monastic rule. [Sidenote: The entire Church monastic. Relative position of Bishops and Presbyters.]