“ At first a stranger to his people he soon enters into their life, falls in love, takes part in an election campaign and is pulled by opposing motives, until he is compelled to fly suddenly back to America to escape the wrath of the Magyar government. He becomes a pastor in a Slovak settlement in a steel town. ”

“ His characters, like the three old men, the schoolmaster and the doctor, are real and the description of life in the Slovak village is so vivid that the reader who was born on the other side feels transported to the days of his childhood. There is realism about the story that does not fear to touch upon the darker sides of life in the village and in the steel town, yet withal the book is pervaded by deep human sympathy and noble idealism ”

“ The title refers to three lovable old men, a Catholic priest, a Jewish distiller and a Protestant landowner whose ill-assorted friendship earned them the nickname of Sanctus Spiritus and Company in their hometown of Hraszova. But the hero of the story is a young man who went to America as a boy and came back as a minister, thoroughly Americanized, almost an Anglo-Saxon. ”