Many of Trollope’s greatest novels have clerical settings.

• Alas! how many of us from week to week call ourselves worms and dust and miserable sinners ... and yet in all our doings before the world cannot bring home to ourselves the conviction that we require other guidance than our own.

  The Three Clerks

• God is good to us, and heals those wounds with a rapidity which seems to us impossible when we look forward, but is regarded with very insufficient wonder when we look backward.

  The Bertrams

• No one becomes an infidel at once. A man who has really believed does not lose by a sudden blow the firm convictions of his soul. But when the work has been once commenced, when the first step has been taken, the pace becomes frightfully fast.

  The Bertrams

• But no lesson is truer than that which teaches us to believe that God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb. To how many has it not seemed, at some one period of their lives, that all was over for them ... And yet they have lived to laugh again, to feel that the air was warm and the earth fair, and that God in giving them ever-springing hope has given everything.

  Orley Farm

• An affectionate letter from a bishop must surely be the most disagreeable missive which a parish clergyman can receive. Affection from one man to another is not natural in letters. A bishop never writes affectionately unless he means to reprove severely.

  Dr Wortle's School

• The modern bishop is a working man, and he is selected in order that he may work. He is generally one who has been conspicuous as a working parish clergyman, and may be and often is as ignorant of Greek as his former parish clerk.

  Anthony Trollope, Clergymen of the Church of England