"Believe in man with all your childhood's confidence," he wrote in "Visions and Tasks," "while you work for man with all a man's prudence and circumspection. Such union of energy and wisdom makes the completest character, and the most powerful life." He said, "I always like men who believe terribly in other men." "Nothing was more remarkable in him," says Canon Farrar, "than his royal optimism. With him it was a matter of faith and temperament. I think he must have been born an optimist. Often, when I was inclined to despond, his conversation, his bright spirits, his friendliness, his illimitable hopes, came to me like a breath of vernal air." The summer of 1892 was spent in Europe by Dr. Brooks. He wrote Archdeacon Farrar after his return, on his birthday, Dec. 13, "In the midst of a thousand useless things which I do every day, there is always coming up the recollection of last summer, and how good you were to me, and what enjoyment I had in those delightful idle days. Never shall I cease to thank you for taking me to Tennyson's, and letting me see the great dear man again. How good he was that day!... and how perfect his death was!... And Whittier, too, is gone.... How strange it seems, this writing against one friend's name after another that you will see his face no more!... I hope that you are well and happy. Do not let the great world trouble you." While he enjoyed England, he was thoroughly American. He wrote from London, "I think that the more one travels here the more he feels that, while there is very much to admire and desire in these English ways, the simplicity and directness of our American fashions of doing things are far more satisfactory." Two weeks later he preached a Christmas sermon at the Church of the Incarnation, New York, for his brother, Dr. Arthur Brooks. This was the day of all days which he loved. He enjoyed giving and receiving Christmas gifts. He said in his sermon, "One of the very wonderful things about our human life is the perpetual freshness, the indestructible joy, that clings forever about the idea of birth. You cannot find the hovel so miserable, the circumstances and the prospects of life so wretched, that it is not a bright and glorious thing for a child to be born there. "Hope flickers up for an instant from its embers at the first breathing of the baby's breath. No squalidness of the life into which it came can make the new life seem squalid at its coming. By and by it will grow dull and gray, perhaps, in sad harmony with its sad surroundings; but at the first there is some glory in it, and for a moment it burns bright upon the bosom of the dulness where it has fallen, and seems as if it ought to set it afire. "And so there was nothing that could with such vividness represent the newness of Christianity in the world as to have it forever associated with the birth of a child.