 Bishop Joseph Butler is commonly cited as the progenitor of emotion accounts. In a way, this is not surprising, for his legacy in the philosophical literature on forgiveness rests on two of his Fifteen Sermons (1726): Sermon VIII (“Upon Resentment”) and Sermon IX (“Upon Forgiveness of Injuries”). Butler does indeed make clear that resentment and forgiveness are importantly related, and his interpreters have often attributed to him the view that forgiveness is the forswearing or overcoming of resentment (Murphy 1988: 15; Haber 1991: 16; Holmgren 1993: 341)