Did Voltaire say “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”?

Did Voltaire say “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”?

Found word for word. The words exist, but not where people usually place them. The earliest match in our corpus comes from another source, listed below.

[266-2] If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.--VOLTAIRE: _A l' Auteur du Livre des trois Imposteurs, epitre cxl._
Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature — John Bartlett, ¶7038 · Public domain (US), Project Gutenberg #27889 · source

Voltaire[1] (1694-1778)--he himself had made this anagram from his name, Arouet l(e) j(eune)--seemed by his many-sided receptivity almost made to be the interpreter of English ideas; in the words of Windelband, he "combines Newton's mechanical philosophy of nature, Locke's noëtical empiricism, and Shaftesbury's moral philosophy under the deistic point of view." The same qualities which made him th
History of Modern Philosophy From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time — Richard Falckenberg, CHAPTER VI. · ¶532 · Public domain (US), Project Gutenberg #11100 · source

But the physicists found their intellectual vision of the world incommunicable to those who were not born with it. It came to the public simply as Materialism; and Materialism lost its peculiar purity and dignity when it entered into the Darwinian reaction against Bible fetichism. Between the two of them religion was knocked to pieces; and where there had been a god, a cause, a faith that the univ
Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch — George Bernard Shaw, ¶121 · Public domain (US), Project Gutenberg #13084 · source

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