The seeming silence of God means human incapacity and dulness. This is the obstacle to hearing. There is an eternal reality corresponding with the ancient phrase, "Communion with God." But this implies more than the existence of the Heavenly voice. It implies organs made sensitive to it. The material world is full of sounds which are constantly failing upon ears that are too dull or too deaf to hear them. We speak of the silence of the sea, of the silence of the night, of the silence of the mighty mountain. But to men with ears, to men not wanting in "the vision and the faculty divine," these things are unceasingly eloquent with speech. To some God does not seem to speak because there has been no preparation for hearing. Where the soul is filled with the noise of mundane voices, the Divine voices which are resounding through its chambers cannot be distinguished. The man who cries despairingly to God, "Be not silent to me," needs to remember that it is himself more than God that needs to be stirred. He must set himself to understand the language in which the Divine One is wont to communicate with the human spirit. Even among men the spoken and the written word are not the only methods of intercommunication. To the trained eye of friendship many an important message may be conveyed without the use of any audible or written word. We speak to God in a voice audible, but He may answer us in impressions, in impulses, and similar. And this language, the language of the spirit of the unseen God, cannot be understood without any instruction. The one who rushes into the Divine presence with petitions, his soul full of earth's voices, having never learned even the alphabet of the spiritual world, cannot expect to understand the answer he may receive, any more than a man ignorant of the telegraph code could interpret the dots and dashes which he is given to understand are the reply to a communication which he has flashed along the speaking wires. To the aspiring, sensitive soul, God is never silent.
(J. Hunter, D. D.)

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