Perkins's state of the controversy is also mistaken
We must therefore admit that the state of the question between the Protestants and the Roman Church is not the one Perkins sets out here: whether man's will has a natural power to cooperate with divine grace in spiritual things. He says the doctors of the Roman Church affirm this and ours deny it, because on our view the will has its cooperation from grace, and on the Roman doctors' view from itself.
'They say,' he writes, 'that man's will concurs and cooperates with God's grace in the sinner's first conversion by itself and by some natural power of its own, and is only helped by the Holy Spirit. We say that man's will does cooperate with grace in the first conversion, but not as moved by itself; it is moved by grace, which must first move and lift it up before it can move itself or will anything well.'
What we reported above makes clear that Perkins is mistaken here, since the doctors of the Roman School teach expressly that the human will cooperates with grace not by its own powers but by those grace has newly supplied to it. The Reformed Catholic, controversy 1, chapter 2.
Latin
LV. Proinde fatendum est inter Protestantes & Ecclesiam Romanam non esse hic eum quem ponit Perkinsus controversiae statum. An, scilicet, voluntas hominis naturalem potentiam habeat cooperandi gratiae divinae in rebus spiritualibus, quod dicit affirmari ab Ecclesiae Romanae Doctoribus, a nostris vero negari; quia juxta nos quod voluntas cooperatur, habet a gratia; at juxta Scholae Romanae Doctores a seipsa. Dicunt, inquit, voluntatem hominis concurrere & cooperari gratiae Dei in prima conversione hominis peccatoris per seipsam, & naturali quadam sua potentia, eamque solum a Spiritu Sancto juvari. At nos dicimus, cooperari quidem gratiae voluntatem hominis in prima conversione; sed non a seipsa motam, sed a gratia: a qua necesse est prius moveatur & erigatur, antequam seipsam movere, aut quicquam bene velle possit. Qua in re falli Perkinsum manifestum est ex iis quae supra retulimus: cum expresse doceant Doctores Scholae Romanae voluntatem humanam gratiae cooperari, non per vires proprias, sed per eas quas ipsi gratia de novo suffecit. In Catholico Reformato Contr. 1. cap. 2.