الَّذِينَ يُؤْمِنُونَ بِالْغَيْبِ وَيُقِيمُونَ الصَّلَاةَ وَمِمَّا رَزَقْنَاهُمْ يُنْفِقُونَ
Who believe[1] in the Unseen[2], and establish prayer, and out of that wherewith We have provided them expend.
[1] Belief, as defined in modern psychology, is the mental state of assurance or conviction in which a mind accepts and endorses its experience as corresponding with reality,- the reality, assented and endorsed in case of religious belief, of course being of a far wider, far deeper, and far more comprehensive nature than reality elsewhere. With belief, in this sense, there invariably emerges a sense of security, a feeling of satisfaction that the road to salvation has been found – a subsuming of oneself in the all-comprising Reality.
[2] i.e., what lies beyond this world of sense and is undiscernible by mere
reason; such things as Resurrection, Paradise, Hell etc. ‘Ghaib’ is
‘anything unperceivable: absent from the range, or beyond the reach of
perception by sense, or of mental perception: or undiscoverable unless
by means of Divine revelation.’ Now this ‘Unseen’ or Great Beyond is
the very breath of religion. Whoever disbelieves in it, disbelieves in
religion altogether. ‘Were one asked’, says the eminent Harvard
psychologist, William James, ‘to characterize the life of religion in
the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that there
is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously
adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the
religious attitude in the soul.’ (Varieties of Religious Experience, p.
53). The reality, the existence, of this Great Beyond, so long
ignored or even denied and ridiculed by the materialistic West, is at
long last being recognized by modern science. Says a leading British
archaeologist of the day:- “The unsound materialistic teaching of the
past generation obscured this great fact of existence. Too much
emphasis was placed on what was dubbed ‘Reason’, and too little on
Intuition.” (Marston, The Bible is True, p. 214). ‘The recognition by
modern science of the reality of the Unseen has dealt a death-blow to
materialism.’ (Marston, The Bible Comes Alive, p. 252)
