Excommunication.
Here is a weapon that attacks religion in the name of religion. Here are people whom the plainest facts would prompt into a confession of Jesus as the Christ, if only they were left to themselves. The truth as it is in Jesus is on one side; threatenings of dire consequences on the other; and truth suffers for the time from the ecclesiastical powers that be.
I. SUPERSTITION AS OPPOSED TO JESUS. Here is a special foe, over and above the ordinary foes with whom Jesus has to deal. Whether any real confession of Jesus would have come from the parents of the blind man, if they had been left to themselves, cannot be conjectured. That which deters one does not deter another. There are people who would not be deterred from confessing Jesus by any amount of physical pain. They can rise above that; it is merely a thing of the body; something specific and measurable. But the same people, if a threat of excommunication came in, would at once begin to hesitate. We do well to study the difficulties the gospel has ever met with through superstition, just because they are difficulties foreign to most who are brought up in a Christian land. We are not likely either to be threatened into Christianity or threatened out of it. But undoubtedly there are many parts of the world where the fear of some dreadful spiritual consequence operates to keep many from even looking at the claims of Jesus. How different the spirit of the true religion is from the spirit of the false ones! The priests of superstition have to use every available means to keep their dupes under control.
II. THE SUCCESS OF THESE SPIRITUAL THREATENINGS. While we have to deplore the hindrances to the gospel which come from these erroneous instructions and traditions, we must also rejoice at what good there is in evil. That is not utterly evil which proves the hold of the supernatural on mankind.
III. THE FAILURE OF THESE SPIRITUAL THREATENINGS. In the case of the parents the threat was successful; in the case of the son it failed. There will always be a few, at all events, whom no possible inducement can keep back from faithfulness to truth. Fear of losing their place in the true great assembly is a mightier motive than that of keeping connection with any visible ecclesiastical system.—Y.