When, in the Mass, we pray for the dead we speak of them as ‘sleeping in the sleep of peace'. There seems to be an echo here of our Lord's words, ‘The maid is not dead but sleepeth', and again of his use of the same verb when speaking of Lazarus. Chrysostom suggests that he is telling his followers not to be afraid of death; and perhaps he is contrasting two very different ideas of the after-life: the grey, wraith-like half-existence of Sheol or Hades with the Christian idea of fulfilment, glory, peace. Certainly nowadays we need to be taught not to fear death: in earlier days it was the sex-words which were taboo; now the taboo has been transferred to the death-words, and one must speak not of dying but of passing on or away or even over.