Phillips Brooks kept his warm heart through life. "Sentiment," he said, "is the finest essence of the human life. It is, like all the finest things, the easiest to spoil.... Let him glow with admiration, let him burn with indignation, let him believe with intensity, let him trust unquestioningly, let him sympathize with all his soul. The hard young man is the most terrible of all. To have a skin at twenty that does not tingle with indignation at the sight of wrong, and quiver with pity at the sight of pain, is monstrous." He thought a young man should "go responsive through the world, answering quickly to every touch, knowing the burdened man's burden just because of the unpressed lightness of his own shoulders, ... buoyant through all his unconquerable hope, overcoming the world with his exuberant faith.... Be not afraid of sentiment, but only of untruth. Trust your sentiments, and so be a man." Phillips Brooks urged the joy which he always showed in his own life. "Joy, not sadness, is the characteristic fact of young humanity. To know this, to keep it as the truth to which the soul constantly returns,--that is the young man's salvation. Whatever young depression there is, there must be no young despair. In the morning, at least, it must seem a fine thing to live." He loved his work better than all else on earth. He wrote a friend in England, "I have had a delightful life; and the last twenty years of it, which I have spent in Trinity Church, have been unbroken in their happiness." Bishop Brooks was courageous. In his sermon, "The Man with Two Talents," he says, "To do great things in spite of difficulties, that is a very bugle-call to many men." Again he says, in "Going up to Jerusalem," "Oh, do not pray for easy lives! Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle!" He emphasizes this in his sermon, "The Choice Young Man," in his Fifth Series. "Sad is it when a community grows more and more to abound in young men who worship wealth, and think they cannot live without luxury and physical comfort. The choicest of its strength is gone." Of gambling he said, "In social life, in club, in college, on the street, the willingness of young men to give or receive money on the mere turn of chances is a token of the decay of manliness and self-respect, which is more alarming than almost anything besides." Bishop Brooks was grandly optimistic. Dr. Samuel Eliot says, "A mother wrote, asking him to baptize her little boy, and he wrote back, 'What a glorious future before a child born at the close of our century!'" "I don't want to be old," he used to say, "but I should like to live on this earth five hundred years."