Wealthy young orphaned Scottish nobleman Lothair has been brought up under the legal guardianship of his Presbyterian uncle Lord Culloden and of a Catholic convert, Cardinal Grandison. Lothair joins the army of Garibaldi and is seriously wounded at the Battle of Mentana. After recovering he takes refuge with the bohemian dandy Mr. Phoebus who takes him to Syria, then in Jerusalem Lothair meets Paraclete, a mystic who teaches him that there is truth in many religions. Lothair decides in favour of the Church of England, resisting the attempts of Cardinal Grandison to convert him to Catholicism, and returns to England.

As a third generation Englishman of what was originally an Italian Jewish family, British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, was raised by parents who regretted their own ethnicity. Although his father Isaac D'Israeli himself never converted, after the death of his own father and a quarrel with local synagogue leaders, he had his children baptized, technically making British citizenship and all of its advantages available to them (such as the ability to own land, attend universities and hold political office-- advantages denied to any English resident who was not a member of the Church of England). Disraeli became the country's first (and so far only) Prime Minister of Jewish heritage, and played an instrumental role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party. Before and during his political career, Disraeli was also well-known as a literary and social figure, mainly writing romances, of which Sybil and Vivian Grey are perhaps the best-known today.