THE execution of the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, last week raised again the issue of capital punishment. It's worth reminding ourselves that more than 70 per cent of the adult population in Britain thinks that the death penalty should be retained for murder.

It's a funny thing, democracy, isn't it? Tony Blair gets a landslide majority when only 25 per cent of the electorate voted for him, but when three-quarters of the country seek the reinstatement of the death penalty, their wishes are denied by a liberal elite which has decided that capital punishment is a primitive and barbaric practice.

The death penalty for cold-blooded, calculating murder is not barbaric: it is just. It puts a high value on human life precisely because it says that the unlawful taking of human life must merit the severest penalty. When a society abolishes the death penalty, it is saying, in fact, that murder is not so bad after all. Under the present law, all convicted murderers are given a mandatory life sentence. But this is misleading, for "life" does not mean life in practice, and many murderers are released after serving some years of their "life" sentence.

We operate a strange system nowadays when it comes to deciding which of our countrymen we should kill. Serial killers like Dr Shipman who may have murdered as many as 600 of his patients, are spared, but thousands of perfectly viable unborn babies are killed off for no better reason than that their birth would be inconvenient for their mothers. At the other extreme of life's passage, stands such as Ludovic Kennedy who stood for parliament as the euthanasia candidate. So here is the moral perversity: we have a system which allows abortion on demand and which in recent court cases has pardoned euthanasia, but which will not permit the retention of the death penalty for murder. In other words, we operate a system which kills the innocent and pardons the guilty.

The abolition of the death penalty reveals modern society for what it is: unjust, utilitarian, secular and atheistic. Our forefathers did not think the death penalty unjust and barbaric - because, as inhabitants of a Christian country, they did not think that death is the worst that can happen to a person. As it says in the gospel: "Fear not them which kill the body; rather fear him which is able to destroy both body and soul in hell". In other words, the greatest reason for fear is the judgement of God on sins unrepented. Of course, the exciting modern world has no room for the notion of God's judgement: the very idea is an affront to our self-regard. What, the idea that we might be eventually accountable? How preposterous! We do not think of ourselves any longer as moral agents who must bear the consequences of our actions both good and bad, but only as consumers who are put on earth to have a good time. In this way, we have trivialised our existence and forgotten the purpose for which we were made. Our society is bound to be fundamentally unjust because it has rejected the law of God, without which all attempts by human beings to act justly must fail.

I SEE Dr David Jenkins, though retired from being Bishop of Durham, is still a master of self-advertisement, even at the expense of the church into which he was ordained and which so recklessly promoted him to high office. According to the BBC's Sunday Programme, Dr Jenkins says in his forthcoming memoirs that the Church of England should be abolished. It shouldn't come as a shock. Abolition of the church is the logical consequence when the bodily resurrection of Christ is denied - as Jenkins repeatedly denied it.

l The Rev Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange

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