the pig-of-lead-like pressure
    Of the preaching man’s immense stupidity.

The pastor, whose words so sway his enraptured flock, mangles the Holy Scriptures with a fine irreverence, and pours forth his doctrine with an entirely self-satisfied indifference to reason and common sense.  Nor has love accomplished its perfect work, for the interloper who stands at the entry is eyed with inquisitorial glances of pious exclusiveness—­how has a Gallio such as he ventured to take his station among the elect?  Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, might have discoursed with a charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae.  And Matthew Arnold would have been right.  These are the precise subjects of Browning’s somewhat rough-and-ready satire.  But Browning adds that in Mount Zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where love is, there is Christ.

Of English nonconformity in its humblest forms Browning can write, as it were, from within; he writes of Roman Catholic forms of worship as one who stands outside; his sympathy with the prostrate multitude in St. Peter’s at Rome is of an impersonal kind, founded rather upon the recognition of an objective fact than springing from an instinctive feeling.  For a moment he is carried away by the tide of their devout enthusiasms; but he recovers himself to find indeed that love is also here and therefore Christ is present, but the worshippers fallen under “Rome’s gross yoke,” are very infants in their need of these sacred buffooneries and posturings and petticoatings; infants

    Peevish as ever to be suckled,
    Lulled with the same old baby-prattle
    With intermixture of the rattle.

And this, though the time has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, “not to speak of trying to climb.”  Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman Catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to be on the same side as Browning without being as crude as he in misconception.  He does not seriously consider the Catholic idea which regards things of sense as made luminous by the spirit of which they are the envoys and the ministers.  It is enough for him to declare his own creed which treats any intermediary between the human soul and the Divine as an obstruction or a veil: 

    My heart does best to receive in meekness
    That mode of worship, as most to his mind,
    Where earthly aids being left behind,
    His All in All appears serene
    With the thinnest human veil between,
    Letting the mystic lamps, the seven,
     The many motions of his spirit,
    Pass as they list to earth from heaven.

This was the creed of Milton and of Bunyan; and yet with both Milton and Bunyan the imagery of the senses is employed as the means not of concealing but revealing the things of the spirit.