When Charles Jacobs, a new minister, comes to town, young Jamie Morton is excited. Almost everyone in the tiny Maine hamlet comes to love Jacobs, his beautiful wife, or both of them. Things change all too suddenly when Mrs. Jacobs and her baby die in a gruesome auto accident. Half-crazed, the reverend denounces God and religion during a sermon, is banished from the town, and thereafter pursues successive careers as a sideshow huckster, and then a faith healer, fueled by his lifelong experiments with electricity.
