In fact the perspective of the Gospel was seriously changed and its most distinctive features obscured. This was specially the case with the experimental doctrines of grace. Here the central glory of the Cross as "the power of God unto salvation" suffered some eclipse, although the passion of Christ was felt to be a transcendent act of Divine Grace in one way or another. But even more serious was the loss of an adequate sense of the contrast between "grace" and "works" as conditions of salvation. There was little or no sense of the danger of the _legal principle_, as related to human egoism and the instinct to seek salvation as a reward for merit. The passages in which these things are laid bare by Paul's remorseless analysis of his own experience "under Law" seem to have made practically no impression on the Apostolic Fathers as a whole. Gentile Christians had not felt the fang of the Law as the ex-Pharisee had occasion to feel it. Even if first trained in the Hellenistic synagogues of the Dispersion, as was often the case, they apprehended the Law on its more helpful and less exacting side, and had not been brought "by the Law to die unto the Law," that they might "live unto God." The result was too great a continuity between their religious conceptions before and after embracing the Gospel. Thus the latter seemed to them simply to bring forgiveness of past sins for Christ's sake, and then an enhanced moral responsibility to the New Law revealed in Him. Hence a new sort of legalism, known to recent writers as Moralism, underlies much of the piety of the Apostolic Fathers, though Ignatius is quite free from it, while Polycarp and "Barnabas" are less under its influence than are the _Didache_, Clement, the Homilist and Hermas. It conceives salvation as a "wages" ([Greek: osthos]) to be earned or forfeited; and regards certain good works, such as prayer, fasting, alms--especially the last--as efficacious to cancel sins. The reality of this tendency, particularly at Rome, betrays itself in Hermas, who teaches the supererogatory merit of alms gained by the self-denial of fasting (_Sim_. v. 3. 3 ff.). Marcion's reaction, too, against the Judaic temper in the Church as a whole, in the interests of an extravagant Paulinism, while it suggests that Paul's doctrines of grace generally were inadequately realized in the sub-apostolic age, points also to the prevalence of such moralism in particular.