“I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second”

The expression “I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second” states the narrator’s governing principle for beginning a book: write one sentence, then leave the next to divine guidance. It turns an apparently modest compositional choice into a declaration of faith, improvisation, and resistance to over-planned authorship.

The declaration

The narrator introduces the principle as something long held in mind and too important to postpone. He distinguishes it from the preceding comparison, which could be offered at any time, and presents this disclosure as the threshold to beginning in earnest. The delay is itself part of the gesture: before setting out on the book, he pauses to explain how its first steps are to be taken.

He claims that among the methods of beginning then in practice throughout the known world, his own is the best—and, more specifically, the most religious. Its procedure is simple: write the first sentence and trust Almighty God for the second. The statement makes composition both an act of authorship and an act of reliance; the writer initiates, but does not claim complete command over what follows.

Against over-planning

The narrator contrasts this method with an authorial fuss that opens the street door and summons neighbours, friends, and kin, along with the devil and his imps equipped with hammers and engines, merely to inspect how one sentence follows another and how the plan follows the whole. The comic extravagance makes elaborate supervision seem less like control than a noisy intrusion into the act of writing.

Against that imagined committee, the narrator’s method allows one sentence to lead into the next without requiring the entire design to be settled in advance. Its confidence lies not in presenting a finished plan, but in proceeding from a first act of writing toward an as-yet-unwritten continuation. The claim of being “the most religious” is therefore also a defense of compositional openness: trust takes the place of exhaustive foreknowledge.

Form and significance

The principle describes more than a way to start a book; it anticipates a narrative practice in which movement can begin before its full course is known. The narrator says that he will mention the matter and then begin in good earnest, so the declaration functions as both explanation and performance: it postpones the beginning long enough to announce a method, then prepares to put that method into action.

The expression’s central tension is between the writer’s deliberate first sentence and the second sentence entrusted to God. Authorship remains active, but its authority is deliberately incomplete. The resulting ideal is neither pure accident nor a fully mastered blueprint: it is a beginning made by human choice, followed by confidence that the next step will arrive.