Browning, the artist and student of art, was not insensible to the spiritual power of beauty; and beauty is conspicuously absent from the praise and prayer that went up from Mount Zion chapel; its forms of worship are burlesque and uncouth.

Browning, the lover of knowledge, was not insensible to the value of intelligence in things of religion; and the congregation of Mount Zion sit on "divinely flustered" under 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.