The Reverend James Frederick Todd, Vicar of Liskeard, has been
suspended from his clerical functions for fourteen days, by the Bishop of Exeter, because in reading the burial-service performed over the body of Mr. Hart, a parishioner, he omitted the words "as our hope is this our brother doth." Mr. Todd had been erroneously informed that Mr. Hart died in a state of intoxication ; and he omitted the words, believing the dying man's last moments to have been sinful,—or, as the Bishop said in his judgment, he "did not choose to give expression to the pious and charitable hope of the Church, that the deceased Christian brother restetla in our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life, and in whom, unless he resteth so as to be found in him at the Last Day, he bath perished everlastingly." Mr. Todd expressed his regret for having acted on a wrong impression of the circumstances of Mr. Hart's death ; but the Bishop declared, that had the circumstances been as Mr. Todd supposed, he had no right to act as he had done. The Bishop strongly condemned the notion that any clergyman possessed such a power of condemning the dead : "to hold for the priesthood a right to judge in every ease of the final condition of the deceased, would be to claim a power of the keys above that to which Papal Rome even dared to aspire."
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