But in return for all this, Christianity offered much--in truth, a splendid guerdon for the life of sacrifice. In the first place, the Christian was delivered from the dread spectre which constantly haunted the life of the pagan--_the fear of death_. Throughout life, sleeping and waking, to the pagan of all ranks and orders, death was an enemy. What the men of the pagan Empire in the early Christian centuries felt in respect of the great universal foe--what they thought of it--is well shown in the epitaphs on the pagan tombs of the first, second, and third centuries.[88] Complete freedom from this ever-present dread was the immediate reward received by the believer: so far was death from being an enemy, that to the Christian it appeared as the best and most longed for friend. Again and again the Church was compelled to restrain rather than to encourage candidates for martyrdom. From Paul, who wrote how “he desired to depart and be with Christ, which was far better” (Phil. i. 23); from Ignatius, whose passionate desire for a martyr’s death appears and reappears, in his Letter to the Romans, in such words as “it is good for me to die for Jesus Christ, rather than to reign over the farthest bounds of the earth”; “Suffer me to receive the pure light when I come thither, then I shall be a man indeed”; “Let me be an imitator of the passion of my God” (_To the Romans_, vi.); from the thousand epitaphs in the catacomb tombs, which we can still read, we gather this knowledge--the absolute freedom of the Christian from that fear of death which weighed so heavily upon all pagan society. The very expressions used by the disciples of the first centuries when speaking of the dread enemy,[89] bear curious witness to the new relation of the believer to the ancient foe of man; they spoke of death as “a passage into life”--as “a sleep.” The spot where the dead were laid was now termed “a cemetery”--“a place of sleeping”; burial was called “depositio”--the body laid up as it were in trust. Cyprian the saintly, the martyr Bishop of Carthage, well voices the feelings of Christians in the matter of death the friend:[90] “Let us think what we mean when we speak of the presence of Christ (after death), of the increasing hosts of our friends, the loved, the reverenced, the sainted who are there. Cyprian cannot even mourn the departed--he only misses them as friends gone on a long journey. He is unable to bear the putting on black garments of mourning, in memory of those who wear the fadeless white.” “Put the terror of death quite away--think only of the deathlessness beyond.” “Let us greet the day which gives to each of us his own country ... which restores us to paradise. Who that has lived in foreign lands would not hasten to go back to his own country?... We look on paradise as our country.”