SOURCE: “Religion & Idealism, as Presented by Giovanni Gentile,” in The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XIX, No. 2, January, 1921, pp. 249-62.

In the following essay, Murri discusses Gentile's ideas about religion in modern Italy as outlined in his Discorsi di religione.

The great modern nationalities sprang up, in the course of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, out of a religious revolution. But Italy's religious revolution is yet to come; and attention to this fact will go far towards explaining the vacillations, the weaknesses, and the internal contradictions that afflict her and so strangely encumber her path.

There is more. Throughout the Middle Ages and on into the Renascence the attitude of Italians towards the Papacy and the Church of Rome showed a marked independence of judgment; and fresh springs of the religious life often rose from the bosom of the popular consciousness independently of any direct ecclesiastical impulse. We have...