"It is hard to say all at once. The first thing that comes to me is, that I would rather live in it than in any other."
"Would you care to vaunt your country at the expense of any other?"
"Not if it did not plainly excel—and even then it might be neither modest nor polite!"
"Would you feel bound to love a man more because he was a fellow-countryman?"
"Other things being equal, I could not help it."
"Other things not being equal,—?"
"I should love the best man best—Scotsman or negro."
"That is as I thought of you. For my part, my love for my own people has taught me to love every man, be his colour or country what it may. The man whose patriotism is not leading him in that direction has not yet begun to be a true patriot. Let him go to St. Paul and learn, or stay in his own cellar and be an idiot.—But now, from loving our country, let us go down the other way:—Do you love the highlands or the lowlands best? You love the highlands, of course, you say. And what district do you like best? Our own. What parish? Your father's. What part of the parish? Why this, where at this moment we are lying. Now let me ask, have you, by your love for this piece of the world, which you will allow me to call ours, learned to love the whole world in like fashion?"
"I cannot say so. I do not think we can love the whole world in the same way as our own part of it—the part where we were born and bred! It is a portion of our very being."
"If your love to what we call our own land is a love that cannot spread, it seems to me of a questionable kind—of a kind involving the false notion of HAVING? The love that is eternal is alone true, and that is the love of the essential, which is the universal. We love indeed individuals, even to their peculiarities, but only BECAUSE of what lies under and is the life of them—what they share with every other, the eternal God-born humanity WHICH IS THE PERSON. Without this humanity where were your friend? Mind, I mean no abstraction, but the live individual humanity. Do you see what I am driving at? I would extend my love of the world to all the worlds; my love of humanity to all that inhabit them. I want, from being a Scotsman, to be a Briton, then a European, then a cosmopolitan, then a dweller of the universe, a lover of all the worlds I see, and shall one day know. In the face of such a hope, I find my love for this ground of my father's—not indeed less than before, but very small. It has served its purpose in having begun in me love of the revelation of God. Wherever I see the beauty of the Lord, that shall be to me his holy temple. Our Lord was sent first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel:-how would you bear to be told that he loved them more than Africans or Scotsmen?"