Who are the adversaries?

 You have spoken of adversaries. Who are they?

The antagonistic spirits who strive to mar our mission and its progress in imitating our work and gaining influence over the deluded. 

These are spirits who have chosen evil―have put aside promptings and influences of good and have banded themselves under the leadership of intelligence still more evil to malign us and to hamper our work. 

They are the foes of God and man―enemies of goodness―ministers of evil. We wage perpetual war against them. 

It is very startling to hear of such a powerful organisation of evil. There are some, you know, who deny the existence of evil altogether and teach that all is good though disguised. 

As the soul lives in the earth-life, so its tastes, predilections, habits and antipathies are with it still. It has not changed save in the accident of being freed from the body. The soul that has been low in taste and impure in habit does not change its nature by passing from the earth-sphere any more than the soul that has been truthful, pure and progressive becomes base and bad by death. 

Wonderful that you do not recognise this truth!

You would not fancy a pure and upright soul degenerating after it has passed from your gaze. Yet you fable a purification of that which has become by habit impure and unholy, hating God and goodness and choosing sensuality and sin. The one is no more possible than the other. 

The soul's character has been a daily, hourly growth. The soul has cultivated habits that have become ingrained in its individuality. 

The spirit that has yielded to the lusts of a sensual body becomes their slave. It would not be happy amid purity and refinement. It would sigh for its old haunts and habits. They are of its essence. 

So you see that the legions of the adversaries are simply the masses of unprogressed, undeveloped spirit who have banded together from affinity against all that is pure and good. 

They can only progress by penitence―through the instruction of higher intelligences and by gradual and laborious undoing of sin and sinful habit. 

The idea that there is no such thing as evil―no antagonism to good―no banded company of adversaries who resist progress and truth and fight against the dissemination of what advantages humanity is an open device of the evil ones for our bewilderment.

Spirit Teachings