To all this may be added two or three particular things, which many persons will think frivolous; but to me nothing appears so, which at all comes in towards determining a question of such importance, as, whether there be or be not, a moral institution of government, in the strictest sense moral, _visibly_ established and begun in nature. The particular things are these: That in domestic government, which is doubtless natural, children and others also are very generally punished for falsehood, injustice, and ill-behavior, as such, and rewarded for the contrary: which are instances of veracity and justice and right behavior, as such, naturally enforced by rewards and punishments, more or less considerable. That, though civil government be supposed to take cognizance of actions in no other view than as prejudicial to society, without respect to the immorality of them, yet as such actions are immoral, so the sense which men have of the immorality of them, very greatly contributes, in different ways, to bring offenders to justice. And that entire absence of all crime and guilt in the moral sense, when plainly appearing, will almost of course procure, and circumstances of aggravated guilt prevent, a remission of the penalties annexed to civil crimes, in many cases, though by no means in all. Upon the whole then, besides the good and bad effects of virtue and vice upon men’s own minds, the course of the world does, in some measure, turn upon the approbation and disapprobation of them as such, in others. The sense of well and ill doing, the presages of conscience, the love of good characters and dislike of bad ones, honor, shame, resentment, gratitude, all these, considered in themselves, and in their effects, do afford manifest real instances, of virtue as such naturally favored, and of vice as such discountenanced, more or less, in the daily course of human life; in every age, in every relation, in every general circumstance of it. That God has given us a moral nature,[73] may most justly be urged as a proof of our being under his moral government: but that he has placed us in a condition, which gives this nature, as one may speak, scope to operate, and in which it does unavoidably operate; _i.e._ influence mankind to act, so as thus to favor and reward virtue, and discountenance and punish vice, this is not the same, but a further additional proof of his moral government; for it is an instance of it. The first is a proof, that he will finally favor and support virtue effectually: the second is an example of his favoring and supporting it at present, in some degree.