Dear St. James’s epistle is a quagmire for Protestant sola fide. It was brazen, but it is also unsurprising that Martin Luther disliked the letter enough to both disparage it (“epistle of straw”) and to contemplate dropping it from his canon. Here is another example why it is a problem for his schema.
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. [1:27]
There is just no way to extract the Protestant view of salvation by faith alone from this verse: faith isn’t even mentioned as a constituent part here of what pure and undefiled religion is.
Aquinas, Etc. 
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