I grew up listening to my father and grandfather discuss the preachers of the Little Rock Conference of the Methodist Church--their gifts and their shortcomings, their ambitions, their foibles. "Preachers are the most jealous profession there is," Dad explained to me. Several I knew only by name; several I came to know when they came to town and had dinner at our house. Not knowing about Anthony Trollope's novels, I couldn't look up anything they talked about in any book. It was apparent that church politics and the variety of clerical personalities would be a fertile field for the novelist. No one has done it like Anthony Trollope. Individual preachers turn up here and there--Sinclair Lewis's _Elmer Gantry_; John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's _Gilead_; Father Jean Marie Latour in _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ by Willa Cather; and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's _The Scarlet Letter_. But these books deal with individual clergy; none get into the church and its politics as does Trollope's series. Peter Raible writes in "Images of Protestant Clergy in American Novels" (Berry Street Essay, 1978) that the sexual activities of the clergy are represented disproportionately in fictional portrayals, at the expense of those whose achievements and shortcomings are in another realm. Surely he did not include Trollope in this generalization. And for the sake of having a list, Kim Fabricius offers on the internet the following list of "Twenty great clergymen in novels:" 1. William Collins in Jane Austen, _Pride and Prejudice_ (1813) 2. Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Scarlet Letter_ (1850) 3. Father Mapple in Herman Melville, _Moby-Dick_ (1851) 4. Obadiah Slope in Anthony Trollope, _Barchester Towers_ (1857) 5. Charles François-Bienvenu Myriel in Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables_ (1862) 6. Edward Casaubon in George Eliot, _Middlemarch_ (1871) 7. Father Zossima in Fyodor Dostoevsky, _The Brothers Karamazov_ (1880) 8. Jean Marie Latour in Willa Cather, _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927) 9. The young curate in Georges Bernanos, _The Diary of a Country Priest_ (1936) 10. The unnamed priest in Graham Greene, _The Power and the Glory_ (1940) 11. Father Paneloux in Albert Camus, _The Plague_ (1947) 12. Hazel Motes in Flannery O'Connor, _Wise Blood_ (1952) 13. Stephen Kumalo in Alan Paton, _Cry, the Beloved Country_ (1948) 14. Dean Jocelin in William Golding, _The Spire_ (1964) 15. Sebastião Rodrigues in Endo Shusaku, _Silence_ (1966) 16. William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco, _The Name of the Rose_ (1983) 17. Oscar Hopkins in Peter Carey, _Oscar and Lucinda_ (1988) 18. Clarence Wilmot in John Updike, _In the Beauty of the Lilies_ (1996) 19. Nathan Price in Barbara Kingsolver, _The Poisonwood Bible_ (1998) 20. John Ames in Marilynne Robinson, _Gilead_ (2004)