The teaching of communicating spirits was, according to convinced spiritualists, strikingly different from what they characterised as the ‘traditional’ teaching of the ‘orthodox’ Churches. Whereas spiritualism offered a vision of the afterlife as a place of beauty, love and peace, the Churches, it was claimed, taught people about a ‘fearful place’ beyond the grave. Death, argued spiritualists, according to this ‘traditional’ teaching, was followed by a period of ‘slumbering’ before human beings rose from their tombs for the final day of judgement, after which those deemed unfit for heaven were punished and tormented for all eternity in a place of ‘unmitigated misery’. Divine judgement of an individual was made purely on the evidence of the earthly life; and, even though judgement day was at an indeterminate point in the future, an individual's eternal state was fixed at point of death, with the result that some left the world irrevocably damned and finally lost.

In the spiritualists’ presentation of ‘traditional’ teaching, God was a Being ‘enthroned on high where he receives the homage of the elect and enjoys the torture of the lost’. The chief tormentor of the lost souls, the Devil, appeared to be more powerful than God. God himself was rendered even more monstrous, according to spiritualists, by the ‘crude’ doctrine of atonement, whereby the salvation of a ‘sin-stained’ humanity was purchased by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, offered to an ‘angry God’:

Spiritualists were particularly scathing about what they characterised as the defining element of this orthodox teaching: that an individual could only be saved for eternity by believing in Christ's atonement. This made Christ's atonement merely ‘a store of merit laid up by the death of this incarnate God on which the vilest reprobate may draw at his death, and gain access to the society of God and the perfected’ – which seemed to spiritualists both wrong and unfair: