What is the struggle between good and evil?

It is the old battle between good and evil―between the progressive and the retrogressive. Spirits of all degrees of malignity, wickedness, cunning and deceit gravitate into the ranks of that opposing army. 

Our inability to see the operations of these undeveloped adversaries renders us unable to grasp their existence―or to appreciate the magnitude of their influence in our world.

Earthbound and unprogressed spirits whom incarnation has brought no gain hover over their old haunts. They live over again their wretched, polluted earth lives by influencing congenial spirits still in the body, and so gratifying their lusts and passions second-hand.

The poor wreck whose lusts have survived physical death finds his resource in seizing on an impressionable medium and goading him on to sin, so that he may get such enjoyment as alone remains for him. The debauched drunkard who sank his body in disease and saturated his spirit with the poisoned draughts of liquid fire, now haunts the dens where his pleasure used to be and goads on the wretches whom it finds possible to influence.

The sot dead, as you falsely think, is a sot in spirit still.

He leers with spite, as he drives another soul to a lower state of misery, and gloats as he draws his own foul gratification, fostering a sink of infamy and disgrace.

These things go on all around us―plague-spots that flourish and abound among us.

We are blind to the dark influence of these baleful spirits, and its malign influence radiates and perpetuates vice among congenial spirits yet on earth.

The undeveloped of every grade and class are a perpetual source of antagonism, and their ranks are being perpetually swelled by spirits debased and degraded by human ignorance.

To their efforts, operating on congenial spirits in our world, we must refer much of crime and misery that exists among us―war with its attendant horrors, which yet disgraces and defiles our world and blots our boasted civilisation and refinement. To them attribute the fostering of the crimes that befoul our great cities that spread a mantle of corruption over them and make them homes of iniquity and dwelling places of shame.