The main point of difference was that Christianity rested morality on a divine command. It took over the fundamental idea of the Jewish theocracy.[292] Its ultimate appeal was not to the reasonableness of the moral law in itself, but to the fact that God had enacted it. Greek morality, on the contrary, was “independent.” The idea that the moral laws are laws of God is, no doubt, found in the Stoics; but they are so in another than either the Jewish or the Christian sense: they are laws of God, not as being expressions of His personal will, but as being laws of nature, part of the whole constitution of the world. Consequent upon the conception of the moral law as a positive enactment of God, the breach of moral law was conceived as sin. Into the early Christian conception of sin several elements entered. It was probably not in the popular mind what it was in the mind of St. Paul, still less what it became in the mind of St. Augustine. But one element was constant. It was a trespass against God. As such, it was on the one hand something for which God must be appeased, and on the other hand something which He could forgive. To the Stoics it was shortcoming, failure, and loss: the chief sufferer was the man himself: amendment was possible for the future, but there was no forgiveness for the past. Beyond these and other points of difference there was a wide area of agreement. The former became accentuated as time went on: it was by virtue of the latter that in the earliest ages the minds of many persons had been predisposed to accept Christianity, and that, having accepted it, they tended to fuse some elements of the new teaching with some elements of the old. The agreement is most conspicuous in those respects which were the chief aims of the contemporary moral reformation; and above all in the importance which was attached to moral conduct. This importance was overshadowed in the later Christian communities by the importance which came to be attached to doctrine: its existence in the earliest communities is shown by two classes of proofs.