IT IS ironical that the peace campaigners should have had their lives saved by the military methods they so loftily disapprove.

But "peace campaigner" is one of those odd new phrases which actually means something like its opposite. It's like "industrial action" - which means there is really no industrial action being performed, because everybody is on strike. Or like "in care" said of children institutionalised because their parents have failed to care for them. A so-called peace campaigner would be better described as a self-indulgent interfering busybody who, by his meddling in things he doesn't understand, puts others lives at risk.

There is a widespread and unjustified supposition that pacifism is the high moral ground. Pacifism is not the high moral ground. It is morally scurrilous. Consider the certain consequences of pacifism. If Britain had turned pacifist in 1940, this country would have been under the Nazi jackboot. And then where would the freedom of speech and human rights be that our present day enthusiasts forever drone on about?

But let us take a more recent example. If those brave men in the fourth plane on September 11 had turned pacifist instead of heroically waging war on the hijackers, then that fourth plane would very likely have been deliberately crashed into the White House or some other prominent target with many hundreds more deaths. But what are hundreds of deaths so long as the pacifist has the spurious satisfaction of having obeyed his smug, deluded conscience?

Certainly, let us acknowledge the pacifist the right to lay down his own life; but he doesn't have the right to lay down the lives of others, especially the lives of the innocent, women and children among them. If a man threatens to kill you, you can let him do so if you like; but you are not justified in letting him kill a child when by confronting the murderer you might save that child.

To denounce pacifism as morally corrupt and in error does not mean that we love war. People who realise that a war has to be fought in order to prevent worse horrors even than war - people like Winston Churchill - are always dismissed by the pacifists as war-mongers. But I can't help thinking we would all rather have had Mr Churchill leading us when the Nazis were 21 miles away across the Channel than Professor Norman Kember.

"You a priest and you believe pacifism is morally corrupt? You ought to be ashamed of yourself! What about Christ's command to turn the other cheek?" That's what pacifists have said to me for 30 years. But I won't be ruled by pacifists. And I won't be ruled by selective quotations from the words of Christ either. For Jesus, who said those words about turning the other cheek, also said: "Think not that I come to bring peace, but a sword."

And that is why the Church has formulated the doctrine of the just war. War is a terrible evil. But it is sometimes not the worst evil. And, as Edmund Burke said: "All that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." And to understand that freedom and innocence and vulnerability must be defended - with violence when necessary - is not to be a war-monger. It is to be highly moral and it is to be courageous. Just like the SAS men who rescued the ungrateful "peace-campaigners" in fact.

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