Rites, acts of worship and sacrifices, originally performed by each individual at his own discretion, or by each household in its own way, fall (as we have seen) with advancing development into the hands of professional persons consecrated for this especial purpose. Very great importance attaches to these consecrated persons. The place they occupy in all societies above the level of barbarism is one of peculiar honor; and their influence on the course of human history has in all ages with which that history is acquainted been conspicuous and profound. Once devoted to their religious duties, they become the authorized representatives of deity on earth. In treating of their consecration, we consider them as channels of communication from earth to heaven; we have now to consider them as channels of communication from heaven to earth. Endowed by the general wish of all human society with a special right to convey their petitions to the divine beings whom they worship, they do not fail to claim for themselves the correlative right of conveying to men the commands, the intentions, the reproofs, and the desires of these divine beings. It is the priests alone who can pretend to know their minds. It is the priests alone who can correctly interpret their often enigmatic language. It is the priests alone through whom they generally deign to converse with mortals. Such is the ecclesiastical theory throughout the world; and it is as a general rule accepted by the communities for whose guidance it is constructed. Exceptions do indeed present themselves, above all in the case of the remarkable men whose careers we shall deal with in the ensuing chapter, who have founded new religions independently of, or even in spite of, very powerful existing priesthoods. And, speaking generally, the holy class is not always coëxtensive with the consecrated class. We shall notice further on an important order among the Jews who were universally received as holy, without being consecrated. Moreover, there has often existed a species of men who, without regular consecration, have nevertheless served as a channel of communication from God or from inferior spirits to man. Such were magicians, astrologers, "et hoc genus omne," in ancient times; such are the so-called mediums in the present day. Conversely, consecration, though by its very nature implying holiness as its correlative, implies it less and less as we rise in the scale of culture. Thus, in the more advanced forms of Protestantism, such as the Presbyterian or the Unitarian, the minister is scarcely more than a mere teacher; he has little or no more power to convey commands or intimations from God than any member of his congregation. So that we should have a rough approximation to the truth were we to say that in the lower grades of religious culture we have holy orders without consecration; while in the higher grades we have consecrated orders without holiness.