Peculiar could not come in contact with a sham, however solemn and pretentious, without applying to it the puncture of his skeptical analysis. He saw his master, Herbert, go to church on a Sunday and kneel in prayer, and on a Monday shoot down Big Sam for attaching himself to the wrong woman. He saw the Rev. Mr. Bloom take the murderer by the hand, as if nothing had happened more tragical than the shooting of a raccoon. And then Peculiar cogitated, wondering what religion could be, if its professors made such slight account of robbery and murder. Was it the observance of certain forms for the propitiation of an arbitrary, capricious, and unamiable Power, who smiled on injustice and barbarity? The more he thought of it, the more inexplicable grew the puzzle. Herbert evidently regarded himself as one of the elect; and Mr. Bloom encouraged him in his security. If heaven was to be won by such kind of service as theirs, Peculiar concluded that he would prefer taking his chances in hell; and so he became a scoffer. His residence in New Orleans, in enlarging the sphere of his experiences, did not bring him the light that could quicken the devotional part of his nature. Dwelling most of the time in a hotel which frequently contained three or four hundred inmates, he was thrown among white men of all grades, intellectual and moral. He instinctively felt his superiority both ways to not a few of these. It was therefore a swindling lie to say that the blacks were born to be the thrall of the whites, that slavery was the proper _status_ of the black in this or any country. If it were true that _stupid_ blacks ought to be slaves, so must it be true of the same order of whites. He heard preachers stand up in their pulpits, and, like the Rev. Dr. Palmer, blaspheme God by calling slavery a Divine institution. “Would it have been tolerated so long, if it were not?” they asked, with the confidence of a conjurer when he means to hocus you. To which Peek might have answered, “Would theft and murder have been tolerated so long, if they were not equally Divine?” The Northern clergymen he encountered held usually South-side views of the subject, and so his prejudices against the cloth grew to be somewhat too sweeping and indiscriminate. Judged of by its relations to slavery, religion seemed to him an audacious system of impositions, raised to fortify a lie and a wrong by claiming a Divine sanction for merely human creeds and inventions. This persuasion was deepened when he found there were intelligent white men utterly incredulous as to a future state, and that the people who went to church were many of them practically, and many of them speculatively, infidels. The remaining fraction might be, for all he knew, not only devout, but good and just. Indeed, he had met some such, but they could be almost counted on his ten fingers.