Summary
Frank Gordon, a firebrand preacher who dares to mingle the Beatitudes with Marx, is cast out from his respectable pulpit and into the moral badlands of 1910s America; there he barters his clerical collar for a soapbox, coaxing coin from the capitalist Mark Overman and the trembling largesse of Kate Ransom—svelte benefactress whose checkbook opens like a silver locket of damnation. At the inaugural rites of his utopian “Temple of Man,” Gordon proclaims from the chancel that the old covenant of marriage is shredded, his ringfinger now entwined with Kate’s in a common-law sacrament, scandalizing pews once warm with bourgeois piety. Then the European war erupts: drums drown out the hymns, khaki crowds the nave, and the pacifist flock demands an anti-conscription gospel that their renegade shepherd refuses to preach. The temple becomes a battlefield of conscience; banners of peace clash with his trumpet of patriotic fury, and the congregation votes with its feet, abandoning the fractured preacher to echoing rafters. Broke and broken, Gordon returns to the parsonage to find Kate’s limbs tangled with Overman’s on the chaise-longue, the banker’s sneer glinting like a gold tooth; in a blind haze he closes his fingers around that throat of capital, squeezing until the gurgle of affluence is silenced forever. Condemned to life in a granite womb of penitence, he becomes the penitentiary’s most eloquent ghost, while outside Ruth—his discarded, steadfast spouse—haunts the governor’s antechambers, trading her mute fidelity for a signature of mercy. When the pardon arrives, it lands not as absolution but as an epitaph: the once-loquacious prophet re-enters the world mute, a stranger to the wife and children who once danced in the margins of his sermons, the Temple of Man razed, its bricks repurposed into the very armaments he once blessed.
Synopsis
After he is publicly denounced for preaching socialism from the pulpit, the Reverend Frank Gordon appeals to banker Mark Overman to assist him in founding his own "Temple of Man." The temple is finally financed by Kate Ransom, a beautiful woman with whom Gordon falls in love, and at the opening ceremony, he announces that he has divorced his wife and entered into a common-law agreement with Kate. With the outbreak of World War I, however, the members of his new congregation oppose conscription while he wholeheartedly supports the Allied cause. Driven from his own church, he returns home to find Kate in Mark's arms, and in a rage he strangles the banker. When he is sentenced to life imprisonment, his ex-wife Ruth pleads with Governor Morrison, who has always loved her, to pardon the errant clergyman, and Gordon is allowed to return to his family.
