It required patience, he would say.

Though he disliked priests, and would not put his foot inside a church for anything, he believed in God.

Were not the proclamations against tyrants addressed to the peoples in the name of God and liberty?
"God for men--religions for women," he muttered sometimes.

In Sicily, an Englishman who had turned up in Palermo after its evacuation by the army of the king, had given him a Bible in Italian--the publication of the British and Foreign Bible Society, bound in a dark leather cover.
In periods of political adversity, in the pauses of silence when the revolutionists issued no proclamations, Giorgio earned his living with the first work that came to hand--as sailor, as dock labourer on the quays of Genoa, once as a hand on a farm in the hills above Spezzia--and in his spare time he studied the thick volume.

He carried it with him into battles.