In England and France Franklin was revered as the answer to the Enlightenment's prayer for the ideal philosopher-scientist. Sir John Pringle,[i-483] one of his warmest friends, in a Royal Society lecture in honor of Maskelyne, might well have been describing Franklin's place in eighteenth-century science when he said: "As much then remains to be explored in the celestial regions, you [Maskelyne] are encouraged, Sir, by what has been already attained, to persevere in these hallowed labours, from which have been derived the greatest improvements in the most useful arts, and the loudest declarations of the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of the Supreme Architect in the Spacious and beautiful fabric of the world."[i-484] To his age Franklin was "that judicious philosopher," judicious and "enlightened" to the extent that his experiments showed how men "may perceive not only the direction of Divine Wisdom, but the _goodness_ of Providence towards mankind, in having so admirably settled all things in the sublime arrangement of the world, that it should be in the power of men to secure themselves and their habitations against the dire effects of lightning."[i-485] Turgot's famous epigram on Franklin, the republican-deist, that he snatched sceptres from kings and lightning from the heavens, in part expressed the extent to which the French public conceived of Franklin, the scientist, as detracting from the terror in the cosmos, hence making their reasonable world more habitable.[i-486] In the popular mind death-dealing lightning had been the visible symbol and proof of Calvin's wrathful and capricious Jehovah. Franklin's dramatic and widely popularized proof that even lightning's secrets were not past finding out, that it acted according to immutable laws and could be made man's captive and menial slave, no doubt had a powerful influence in encouraging the great untheological public to become ultimately more receptive to deism. If Franklin was apotheosized as the apostle of liberty, he was no less sanctified as a "Modern Prometheus." In his own words, he saw science as freeing man "from vain Terrors."[i-487] To Condorcet, his friend and disciple, Franklin was one who "was enabled to wield a power sufficient to disarm the wrath of Heaven."[i-488]