Bede well expresses this when, in describing one of her offshoots at Lindisfarne, he says, ‘All the presbyters, with the deacons, cantors, lectors, and the other ecclesiastical orders, along with the bishop himself, were subject in all things to the monastic rule.’[81] The Irish Church was therefore at this period a monastic church in the fullest sense of the term, and the inevitable effect of this was materially to influence the relation between the two grades of bishops and presbyters, both as to position and as to numbers. In order to estimate rightly the nature of this change, it is necessary to keep in view the distinction between the power of mission and that of orders. The former is the source of jurisdiction, and the latter of the functions of the episcopate. When the two are united, we are presented with a diocesan episcopacy; but the union is not essential. A monastic church requires the exercise of episcopal functions within her as much as any other church, and for that purpose possesses within her the superior grade of the bishop according to canonical rule;[82] but when it became customary for the abbot of the monastery as well as several of the brethren to receive the ordination of the priesthood, for the purpose of performing the religious rites within the monastery, the tendency of all monasteries within a church was to encroach upon the functions of the secular clergy, and not only to claim exemption from the episcopal jurisdiction, but even to have within themselves a resident bishop for the exercise of episcopal functions within the monastery, to whose abbot he was subject as being under the monastic rule.[83] The idea of transferring monachism entirely to the clergy of a particular district was not absolutely unknown in the Western Church.[84] But at this period it was adopted by the Irish Church in its entirety; and when the entire church became monastic, the whole episcopate was necessarily in this position. There was nothing derogatory to the power of episcopal orders, nothing to reduce the bishops, as a superior grade, below or even to the level of the presbyters; but the mission, and the jurisdiction of which it is the source, were not in the bishop, but in the monastery, and that jurisdiction was necessarily exercised through the abbot as its monastic head. There was episcopacy in the church, but it was not diocesan episcopacy. Where the abbot, as was occasionally the case, was in episcopal orders, the anomaly did not exist. But the presbyters greatly outnumbered the bishops, and the abbot in general retained his presbyterian orders only. [Sidenote: The presbyter-abbot.]