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What is silence? Not the absence, the negation of speech, but the pause, the suspension of speech. Speech is, we all admit, one of God's choicest gifts to man, for the employment of which man is specially and awfully responsible. Must not something of the like sacredness and responsibility belong to that correlative power — the power of silence? As if to impress this truth upon our minds, Scripture invests silence with circumstances of peculiar interest and awe. Thus, when Solomon dedicated the Temple to Jehovah, after that the priests had arranged all the sacred furniture, and completed the solemn service of consecration, there was silence, and during that silence the glory of the Lord, in the form of a cloud, so filled the whole building that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud. Thus, again, in the text, when the angel "had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." Very wonderful and mysterious is this instance of silence. It was as though, upon the opening of the mystic seal, events so strange and amazing were to follow throughout the universe, that the very hosts of heaven were compelled to suspend their worship and adoration in order to behold and listen! Now, the first sort of silence to which I would call your attention is the silence of worship, of awe, and reverence. "The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him." Such is the canon for worship laid down by Habakkuk; and it is a canon as much binding upon us as upon those to whom it was originally addressed. When we come up to the house of prayer, there to meet Christ upon the mercy-seat — there to hear His voice speaking to us in the read and spoken Word — there to receive Him into our very souls in the Sacrament of His broken Body and shed Blood — we are bound to observe the silence of awe and reverence. Except when we open our lips to join in prayer and praise to God, our attitude within these hallowed walls should be that of silence, of those who are impressed with the sanctity of the place, and who know and feel that the Almighty God is indeed in their midst. Yes; and it would be well, could we put more of this holy silence into our religious acts. Our religion shares too much in the faults of the age in which we live. It is too public, too outspoken, conducted too much as a business; and so the inner and contemplative element is too much lost sight of. The silence of self-examination, the silence of the heart's unsyllabled supplication, the silence of meditation on the mysteries of redeeming love — these are forms of silence which every one must observe often who would have the flame of spiritual life to burn bright and clear in his soul. Then, again, there is the silence of preparation. Every great work that has ever been achieved has been preceded by this-the doer making himself ready, by thought and study, for action. Every great achievement, whether in the moral or the intellectual world, has been in a sense like Solomon's temple — it has risen noiselessly, silently, without sound of axe or hammer. Therefore is that great primary act in religion — the conviction of sin — invariably preceded by deep and solemn silence, while the sinner stands before God self-accused and self-condemned. Therefore, also, is silence ever present at all the more solemn passages of our life. Sorrow — real, genuine sorrow — is ever silent. A cry — a tear — what relief would these be; but they must not intrude into the sacred ground of sorrow, the sorrow of the just — bereaved widow or orphan. And so, too, sympathy with sorrow is ever silent. Idle words, or still idler tears — these are for false comforters, like those who troubled the patriarch Job; the true sympathy is the sympathy of a look — of the presence of silence, not of uttered consolation. And now think of that last silence — a silence that we must all experience, and for which, by silence, we must prepare now — the silence of death. What exactly the silence of death is, none but the dying can know. May we have known what it was, day by day, to be many times alone with that God who must then be alone with us, to judge or else to save.

(Charles H. Collier, M. A.)

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KJV: And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

WEB: When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.