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I. THE SILENCE OF SUPPRESSION. "While I kept silence," David says; that is, while I suppressed my sense of sin, and sought to check and coerce the tide of free confession. This is the silence of our fallen nature; our abuse of God's gift, bestowed upon us for a very different end. If any of us are thus silent to God, let not night close upon us without breaking that silence: if conscience accuses us of sin, let it be heard while it may: if any iniquity of ours is separating between us and God, bring it to Him, and spare it mot, that it may be forgiven for Christ's sake, and its chain removed from us by His Holy Spirit.

II. THE SILENCE OF CONVICTION. First there has been that sullen silence of which we have spoken; the heart locked up, and refusing to empty itself of its secret. Then, many times, the first silence has been broken by prevarications, excuses, and self-justifications, going perhaps even to the length of direct falsehood. Then, in process of time, by patient hearing and inquiry, these also have been broken down: the false tongue has been confuted by the force of truth, and every refuge of lies has at length been swept away. When this is so, then at last there is silence; refreshing by comparison, and, in this life, certainly in young life, hopeful; till it comes, there is no hope, because the soul is still trying to say Peace to itself fallaciously. But now there is silence: now may punishment try its remedial power, being accompanied, as it ever ought to be, with a fall forgiveness. Now, too, may the sinner, humbled in himself, before others, and before God, listen with livelier interest to the assurance of God's forgiveness, to the comfort of the blood of sprinkling which speaks not to reproach but to console.

III. THE SILENCE OF PREPARATION. Every real, certainly every great, work of man is prefaced by a long silence, during which the mind is concentrated upon the object, and possessing itself with that which is afterwards to be produced. What is all study but the preliminary to some work, or else to one's life's work? It is not in man to be capable of always giving out, without long processes of taking in. This is the secret of so many barren and unfruitful ministries, that men are trying to dispense with silence: they are altogether in public, never in solitude: they are counting their exertions, instead of weighing them, satisfied if they are always labouring, without forcing themselves to prepare for labour by silent study, by silent meditation, by silent prayer.

IV. THE SILENCE OF ENDURANCE; that of him who with a noble self-restraint refuses to avail himself even of a plea which might avail for his deliverance. He is following the example of One who Himself in the very crisis of His earthly fate exhibited in its fullest glory the dignity and the majesty of silence.

V. THE SILENCE OF DISAPPROBATION; that silence by which, perhaps most effectively of all, whether in the society of the young or of the old, a Christian enters his protest against wrong, and acts as a witness for the truth. Who has not seen the effect of silence, of a Christian, a consistent silence, upon uncharitable or wicked conversation? Before the presence of disapprobation, however unobtrusive, evil soon shrinks, cowers, and withdraws itself.

VI. THE SILENCE OF SELF-RESTRAINT, general and habitual, or else special and particular.

VII. THE SILENCE OF SORROW, AND OF SYMPATHY WITH SORROW.

1. Grief may forget itself (as it is called) for the moment in society, and sorrow for sin may spend itself — alas! it often does — in fruitless and only half-explicit confessions and lamentations to man: but these are dangerous as well as vain remedies. In either case, be silent; only add the words, silent before God. Let Him hear all from you, and, to speak generally, none else.

2. I spoke, too, of the silence of sympathy. Who has not suffered from the officiousness of a talking sympathy?

VIII. THE SILENCE OF AWE, THE SILENCE OF MEDITATION, THE SILENCE OF PRAYER, YES, THE SILENCE OF PRAISE.

IX. THE SILENCE OF DEATH. The silence of death may reign around the bed from which a living soul has departed and on which a dead body lies alone. But it reigned first in the departing soul itself. At what particular point in the illness isolation began, and the presence of friends was no longer felt in the dying, varies no doubt with the nature of the disease, and certainly can by none be defined: but well may it be seen that after a certain point silence and solitude have taken possession, that there is, to all intents, an abstraction from things around, and an absorption in things within.

(Dean Vaughan.)

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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.