Interlude Summary

In this prose interlude, Archbishop Thomas Becket, gives a brief sermon in which he claims that the gifts of God are not the same kind of gifts, or even the result of the same kind of giving, as those given by people in the temporal world. Instead, he claims, the gifts given by heaven are real, eternal, unequivocal, and most important, preordained. He says carefully that if one wishes, for example, to be a martyr, one cannot just choose to be so. Instead, if one is chosen to be a martyr, the gift of martyrdom will find you. If you seek it out, and even if you eventually are successful in engineering your own death in the name of God, you will not have become a martyr. Instead, martyrdom can only come to those who don't actually seek it, as with all other...