Many varieties of “faith cures” have been before the world. The so-called Christian Science movement is now the most prominent of them all, combining an idealistic philosophy and pantheistic religion. This combination takes up various aspects of Buddhism, Gnosticism, and a dash of Christian verbiage with the vital elements of Christianity gone, and uses some of the well-known ideas of modern psychology as to the influence of the mind on the body. As a whole, it is a hopeless jumble of absurdities and inconsistencies and is hostile to the worship of Jesus. It leads astray a certain type of mind without clear reasoning processes and fattens on the fees for mental healing, a portion of which goes to the mother church in Boston. There is only the most superficial parallel between what James here describes and what the Christian Science “healer” practices. There is in James an absence of all mercenary ideas. There is no “commercialized use of prayer,” to use the legal phrase of one of the New York courts. There is also the use of olive oil, the best medicine known to the ancient world and still one of the best remedial agencies, whether used internally or externally. The disciples of Jesus on their tour of Galilee had the double ministry of preaching and healing (Matt. 10:7 f.), and they anointed the sick with oil (Mark 6:13). In Isaiah 1:6 the prophet says that the bruises were “neither bound up, neither mollified with oil.” So the good Samaritan bound up the wounds of the poor victim of the robbers and poured oil and wine upon him (Luke 10:34). A number of questions come bristling for discussion as we proceed with this passage in James. The use of the word “church” rather than synagogue, as in 2:2, is to be observed. The local church undoubtedly had a close kinship to the Jewish synagogue in origin and worship. The very phrase “elders of the church” occurs also in Acts 20:17 and in the plural, like bishops at Philippi (Phil. 1:1). There was a council of elders in the synagogue (Luke 7:3), and the word appears in an official sense in the Egyptian papyri.[96] But a more vital question for our subject is whether these elders come in an official capacity to perform an ecclesiastical “anointing” with oil or whether they come to pray as brothers in Christ and rub with the olive oil (cf. Isa. 1:6) as medicine. Mayor quotes Philo (_Sonm_, M. i. 666), Pliny (N. H. xxiii. 34-50), and Galen (_Med. Temp._, book ii) in praise of oil as a medicine. In Herod’s last illness a bath of oil was recommended to him (Jos., _War_ i. 33, 5).