I once speculated in an essay that the young gentlemen who came of age in the newly emerging Edwardian era sought their spiritual nourishment in Nature, having abandoned at Oxford and Cambridge the more traditional forms & structures of their Victorian ancestors. And one place they sought (and found, and wrote about) this sense of the numinous was on golf's fields of play:'in the misty silence, as the rain fell from low grey clouds draped over a sea-side links like a shroud'. (A sort of coincidence: James wrote "The Varieties of Religious Experience" in 1902; Hultain wrote "The Mystery of Golf" in 1908; Low wrote "Concerning Golf" in 1903.) Jump ahead about 100 years, and the even more secularized counterparts to those Edwardian gentlemen (today: men and women, young and old, of various economic classes) living now in great teeming cities like Chicago, London and New York and with little respite from the 24 hour news (or work) cycles and a constant digital buzz, have once again sought (and found, and wrote about) their refuge in the quiet and expansive peace of far flung sea-side links: on fields of play seemingly untouched by the hands of man, with the low grey clouds and the soft tumble of waves, they experience the numinous, and are entranced. They return home rejuvenated and refreshed: marking their rating/ranking cards enthusiastically, paying off their credit cards with pleasure, planning to return to their place of spiritual nourishment as soon as possible.
I think that's why Hunter's "The Links" is still relevant: it describes an evergreen antidote to a perennial longing of the human heart.
(David - just saw your post before I posted mine: we were thinking along the same lines at the same time!)