A LESSON FROM MY FOUNTAIN PEN.
By Henry Ostrom
ONCE my religion was of the dipping kind. You know you motion downward, not upward, when you dip. So I would dip into this source of pleasure and into that little poorly-filled well of encouragement but to find the result sometimes excessive and often excessively meager, only to return again to find that the contents had seemed to be evaporated. At best, it was in the long run disappointing and tantalizing. Now I have learned a better way. It is this: Fill from the top. My fountain pen illustrated the way to me. When I had it well filled it just wrote away until I had scribbled all over the pages for many hours—and never a dip. The ink awaited as if on tiptoe every sway and jolt I might give—and just flowed. And when I placed my pen aside awaiting its next needed use, it remained always ready, so that at the very next sway or jolt it would flow. How many a life like mine formerly goes along dipping, dipping! Now, child of promise, let me tell you something—if you want to live a joyous, peaceful, Christly life, moment by moment, give up the dipping, and just in simple but absolute faith claim your Father's promise to fill you with the Holy Spirit, and your full life will flow through every channel of duty. No more dipping, surely, since "he that believeth on Me, as the scripture hath said, out of his inmost self shall flow rivers of living water."—Evangelist Henry Ostrom.