[30] Idem est ergo presbyter qui episcopus, et antequam diaboli instinctu studia in religione fierent. ... communi presbyterorum concilio Ecclesiæ gubernabantur. Indifferenter de episcopo quasi de presbytero est loquntus (Paulus) .... sciant episcopi se, magis consuetudine quam dispositionis dominicæ veritate, presbyteris esse majores. (Hieronymus ad Titum, i. 5.) A presbyter accordingly is the same as a bishop, and before that by a suggestion of the devil, party strife entered into religion..... the churches were governed by a common council of presbyters. Paul spake without any distinction between bishops and presbyters..... the bishops know that it is to custom rather than to any actual direction of the Lord that they owe their superiority to presbyters. [31] Bishop Munter makes this remark in his dissertation _On the Ancient British Church_, about the primitive identity of bishops and priests, and episcopal consecration. _Stud. und Krit._ an. 1833. [Sidenote: CONTINENTAL MISSIONS.] The missionary fire, which the grandson of Fergus had kindled in a solitary island, soon spread over Great Britain. Not in Iona alone, but at Bangor and other places, the spirit of evangelization burst out. A fondness for travelling had already become a second nature in this people.[32] Men of God, burning with zeal, resolved to carry the evangelical torch to the continent--to the vast wildernesses sprinkled here and there with barbarous and heathen tribes. They did not set forth as antagonists of Rome, for at that epoch there was no place for such antagonism; but Iona and Bangor, less illustrious than Rome in the history of nations, possessed a more lively faith than the city of the Cæsars; and that faith,--unerring sign of the presence of Jesus Christ,--gave those whom it inspired a right to evangelize the world, which Rome could not gainsay. [32] Natio Scotorum quibus consuetudo peregrinandi jam pæne in naturam conversa est. (Vita S. Galli, Sec. 47.) The nation of the Scots in whom the habit of travelling abroad had already almost become a second nature.