  Resentment or anger was somewhat more difficult for Butler to deal with insofar as it was ubiquitous to human beings but conflicted with the Christian command to love our enemies. Butler made two distinctions, between settled (or deliberate) and hasty (or sudden) resentment and between resentment raised by non-moral harm or resentment raised by moral injury. He further distinguished between resentment and the negative passion of malice (although he denies the existence of disinterested, cool, direct ill-will or malice). Hasty resentment is an immediate response to “mere harm without appearance of wrong or injustice,” (Sermon VIII, §7). It can be excessive and misguided, and one can be morally culpable for excessive and misguided expressions of it, but hasty resentment serves an important end of self-preservation and care of one’s near and dear. Settled resentment is an affection that has moral evil or injustice as its object. Although moral evil gives rise to pain which can strengthen this settled resentment, the object of the resentment is not the pain or harm done but instead the design or intention to morally injure, harm, do wrong and injustice. And the goal of resentment is to cause appropriate injury in a wrongdoer, not malign injury or revenge that are distinguished from resentment. For Butler, settled resentment has an important moral end in drawing men together to pursue justice, in making them fear engendering resentment in mankind due to their actions, and to extirpate moral wickedness: it is “one of the common bonds by which society is held together, a fellow feeling, which each individual has in behalf of the whole species, as well as oneself.” Indeed Butler goes so far as to suggest that communal moral resentment and the justice it gives rise to is what separates us from the state of nature where each man is arbiter of his own punishment which quickly devolves into revenge (a point developed further in Six Sermons).