What good are the arts?

"People in the West have been saying extravagant thing about the arts (...) The arts, its is claimed, are 'sacred', they 'unite us with the supreme Being', theu are 'the visible appearance of God's Kingdom on earth, they 'breathe spiritual dispositions' into us, they 'inspire love in the highestpart of the soul' they have a 'higher reality and more veritable existence' that ordinary life, they express the 'eternal' and 'infinitive' and they 'reveal the innermost nature of the world.' (...)
John Carey