According to Wikipedia, this remark was "contained in a verse epistle from 1768, addressed to the anonymous author of a controversial work [entitled] The Three Impostors. But far from being the cynical remark it is often taken for, it was meant as a retort to atheistic opponents such as d'Holbach, Grimm, and others." Wikipedia continues: "[Voltaire] has had his detractors among his later colleagues. The Scottish Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle argued that 'Voltaire read history, not with the eye of devout seer or even critic, but through a pair of mere anti–catholic spectacles.'"
© Haydn Thompson 2020