'Put off a sin or a piece of a sin every day.'--_Rutherford_.

If that gaunt old tower of Cardoness Castle could speak, and would tell
us all that went on within its walls, what a treasure to us that story
would be! Even the sighs and the meanings that visit us from among its
mouldering stones tell us things that we shall not soon forget. They
tell us how hard a task old John Gordon found salvation to be in that old
house; and they tell us still, to deep sobs, how hard it was to him to
see the sins and faults of his own youth back upon him again in the sins
and faults of his son and heir. Old John Gordon's once so wild heart was
now somewhat tamed by the trials of life, by the wisdom and the goodness
of his saintly wife, and not least by his close acquaintance with Samuel
Rutherford; but the comfort of all that was dashed from his lips by the
life his eldest son was now living. Cardoness had always liked a good
proverb, and there was a proverb in the Bible he often repeated to
himself in those days as he went about his grounds: 'The fathers have
eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.' The
miserable old man was up to the neck in debt to the Edinburgh lawyers;
but he was fast discovering that there are other and worse things that a
bad man entails on his eldest son than a burdened estate. There was no
American wheat or Australian wool to reduce the rents of Cardoness in
that day; but he had learnt, as he rode in to Edinburgh again and again
to raise yet another loan for pocket-money to his eldest son, that there
are far more fatal things to a small estate than the fluctuations and
depressions of the corn and cattle markets. Gordon's own so expensive
youth was now past, as he had hoped: but no, there it was, back upon him
again in a most unlooked-for and bitter shape. 'The fathers have eaten
sour grapes' was all he used to say as he rose to let in his drunken son