The task of the critic according to New Criticism?

From the text:

If literature takes the place of religion, as Arnold had prophesied, then poets and critics, in their mutual dependency, are the priests who spread the new gospel. This is indeed the impression one more than occasionally gets (not least in the writings of F.R. Leavis). For a period of fifty years the large majority of literary academics on both sides of the Atlantic saw themselves as the elect, as an intellectual and moral elite that had as its central task to safeguard ‘life’, the fullness of human experience.