Theron Ware is a pleasing and ambitious young minister assigned to a church in upstate New York. He arrives with his sensible wife and discovers he is expected to follow the spiritual and economic dictates of a group of Methodist church fathers who are hard-nosed businessmen six days a week and hard-nosed evangelicals on the seventh. When he meets his first Irish Catholics, he is unsettled but thrilled: they might as well be sorcerers and goddesses leading him into forbidden but exquisite rites and mysteries. Theron becomes desperate to join their world without having to surrender the rewards of his own.