Early last month a terminally ill British woman flew with her husband to Zurich where a Swiss organisation, Dignitas, helped her to commit suicide. In the UK such an assisted suicide would have been illegal, but the trip to Switzerland had been made possible by a landmark High Court judgement in which the judge had ruled that the law should not interfere with 'the rights' of the woman to die.

Given the publicity engendered by the High Court ruling, I am sure that I am not the only person who has struggled over the past few weeks with the complex moral issues raised by the activities of Dignitas. On the face of it, who could argue with the compassionate motives of those who seek to help the terminally ill to end their lives, especially when physical incapacity has removed from the patient the possibility of unassisted suicide? Yet the argument is not quite so simple. Those who seek the help of others to end their lives are no longer acting with moral autonomy, since those who offer assistance inevitably become, themselves, moral agents in an action which, in other circumstances, carries weighty legal sanction: the deliberate ending of another's life. In any case the motivation, however honourable, of those who belong to organisations such as Dignitas is surely an insecure means of helping to judge the morality of assisted suicide. Those who advocate a return to capital punishment in the UK, or indeed more liberal abortion laws, would doubtless claim honourable motives for their views. Such motives would not of themselves, however, make those views right.

Christians differ about the issue of assisted suicide - as they do about capital punishment and abortion - and Christian tradition both before and after the Reformation has always emphasised the role of conscience in coming to informed moral decisions. What Christians all have a duty to do, however, is to educate (that is, to nurture) our conscience and to allow the mind of Christ to grow within us as we gather together in worship, in prayer and in fellowship.