The Mystery Schools of each religion furnish to the more advanced members of the race or nation embracing it a higher teaching, which, _if lived_, advances them into a higher sphere of spirituality than their brethren. But as the religion of the backward races is of a lower order than the religion of the pioneers, the Christian nations, so also the _Mystery Teaching of the East is more elementary than that of the West_, and the Hindu or Chinese Initiate is on a correspondingly lower rung of the ladder of attainment than the Western Mystic. Please ponder this well so that you may not fall a victim to misguided people who try to persuade others that the Christian religion is crude compared with oriental cults. Ever westward in the wake of the shining sun, the light of the world, has gone the star of empire, and is it not reasonable to suppose that the spiritual light has kept pace with civilization, or even preceded it as thought precedes action? We hold that such is the case, that the Christian religion is the loftiest yet given to man, and that to repudiate the Christian religion, esoteric or exoteric, for any of the older systems is analogous to preferring the older textbooks of science to the newer ones which embrace discoveries to date. Neither are the practices of Eastern aspirants to the higher life to be imitated by Westerners; we refer particularly to the breathing exercises. They are both beneficial and necessary to the unfoldment of the Hindu, but it is otherwise with the Western aspirant. To him it is dangerous to practice breathing exercises for soul unfoldment; they will even prove subversive of soul growth, and they are, moreover, absolutely unnecessary. The reason is this: During involution the threefold spirit has become gradually incrusted in a threefold body. In the Atlantean Epoch man was at the nadir of materiality. We are just now rounding the lowest point on the arc of involution, and starting upward on the arc of evolution. At this point, then, all mankind is immured in this earthly prison house to such a degree that spiritual vibrations are almost killed. This is, of course, particularly true of the backward races and the lower classes in the Western world. The atoms in such backward race bodies are vibrating at an exceedingly low rate, and when in the course of time one of these people develops to a point where it is possible to further him upon the path of attainment, it is necessary to raise this vibratory pitch of the atom so that the vital body, which is the medium of occult growth, may to a certain extent be liberated from the deadening force of the physical atom. This result is attained by means of breathing exercises, which in time accelerate the vibration of the atom, and allow the spiritual growth necessary to the individual to take place.