The less also is it satisfied with the mediation of a priest. Priest (or Priest-King) is sole mediator in most savage tribes: his mediation is enormously important in the Roman Catholic Church: less so in Protestant Churches: until with the progressive raising of the spiritual and cultural level, it is perhaps possible that he may become an obstacle instead of a help. Mediators there must always be. They are the great ones--prophets and poets, heroes, philosophers, musicians, artists, and all who discover or interpret or display what for the ordinary man is hidden or difficult or rare. They mediate between the utmost attainable by man and man in the lump. As Hegel says of one group of these mediators, the artists, it is the function of their art to deliver to the domain of feeling and delight of vision all that the mind may possess of essential and transcendent Being. But, with the spread of invention and the change of civilization, their mediations are becoming more and more readily accessible to all. I can get, on the whole, more satisfactory mediation from three or four feet of properly filled bookshelf than from a dozen priests. Milton will give me doctrine if I want it, but stupendously: Wordsworth will reveal nature: Shakespeare the hearts of men: Blake can put men into a mystical, Shelley into an intellectual ecstasy, while Keats and a dozen others can open universal doors of beauty. What is more, if I have had the mediation of wise parents and good teachers, or to be so fortunate as to be enthusiastic, I find that in many things I can be my own mediator, in the same way as the Protestant found that he could read his Bible and eat the holy bread and wine for himself as well or better than the priest could do it for him. Whatever we may say or like, it is an obvious fact that much of what is essential in religious experience, which in a simpler society was only attainable in prayer and sacrifice, communal ceremony or ritual worship, is now attainable to an increasing degree through literature, music, drama, art, and is, again, as a matter of fact, so attained by an increasing number of people who do not profess a creed or belong to a church. So that, as regards the personal, individual side of religion, many of the functions of Churches will inevitably be better performed through direct contact between the individual and the mediator--philosopher, poet, artist, or whatever he be--who provides the experience.