If you have not read Anthony Trollope's works, a good place to start is The Warden; it is shorter than his other novels of clerical life, and it is -- like many of his works -- bitter-sweet. (Warning: parts of the plot are revealed on this page.)

Septimus Harding is an older parson in nineteenth-century Barchester, and enjoys the wardenship of certain almshouses for aged workers -- a position which is pretty much a sinecure, though he looks after the men well and is greatly loved by them. An expose in a national newspaper suggests that the almshouses are being improperly administered, with too little going to the almsmen and too much to the church officials. While the ancient almsmen talk greedily about getting as much as a hundred pounds each, Mr. Harding realizes his conscience will no longer permit him to hold the position of warden. By the end of the novel, the matter has been forgotten by the national press, a new, part-time warden has been appointed, it has been determined that the almsmen should receive no more than the parsimonious allowance they currently receive, and they have lost their beloved Mr. Harding -- in short, it has proved a tragedy for the almsmen. As his last act, Mr. Harding visits a dying almsman, Bell:

"And so you're really going?" the man again asked.

"Indeed I am, Bell."

... "And your reverence," said [Bell], and then he paused, while his old palsied head shook horribly, and his shrivelled cheeks sank lower within his jaws, and his glazy eye gleamed with a momentary light; "and your reverence, shall we get the hundred a year, then?"

This is addiction -- not to drugs, alcohol, food, gambling, but to the world; at the moment of his death, Bell is still grasping for gain. As the last three Steps constantly remind us, it is not the gaining or the losing that causes our suffering, but our wanting.