1941, when I was twenty-two, I became an officer in a fleet destroyer, and on several occasions experienced a sense of the spiritual which I found quite magical. It always took place after dark when I had one of the night watches. I was alone on the open bridge while most of the ship's company of some 250 slept below: their safety was in my hands. On summer evenings when the sea was calm, there was no movement except the gentle swaying of the foremast from side to side, like a giant inverted metronome, no sound but the swish of the bows as they sliced through the water and the tick-tick of the gyro compass repeat as it shifted in its gimbals. Stars, billions of miles distant, seemed ever close and protective, a watchful presence above my head. (Later, as navigator of another destroyer, one of them, Vega, would show me the way from Scapa Flow to Murmansk.) There were moments then when I felt that sky and sea and I were one, concordant and indivisible, and I recalled Rupert Brooke's line about 'a width, a shining peace under the night'. For me it was both a glimpse of eternity and the peace that passeth all understanding, and on the four or five occasions it happened in the course of the war, I treasured every moment; and, when the watch ended, though tired after four hours' standing, went down to my cabin with lighter tread.

Wordsworth too experienced something similar when he wrote of a mood

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world

Is lightened . . .

And again when he spoke of

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the eye of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts

And rolls through all things.

So did the nineteenth-century naturalist and wnter, Richard Jefferies, in his book, The Story of my Heart. He had walked three miles from the farm near Swindon where he lived to the top of a hill:

I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the sward, I first looked up at the sky, gazing for a long time till I could see deep into rhe azure. Then I turned my face to the grass and the thyme. I felt deep down into the earth under, and high above into the sky. Gradually entenng into the intense life of the summer day, I came to feel the long-drawn life of the earth into the dimmest past, while the sun of the moment was warm on me. I was plunged deep in existence.

Beside the place where he had lain down was a 2,000- year-old tumulus:

Two thousand years! Two thousand times, the woods grow green and the ring-doves build their nests . . . Mystery gleaming in the stars, pounng down in the sunshine, speahng in the night, the wonder of the sun and of far space, for twenty centunes about this low and green-grown dome. Yet all that mystery and wonder was as nothing to the spirit I felt so close . . . Realising that spint, recognising my own inner consciousness so clearly, I could not understand time. Now, this moment, was the wonder and the glory.

In the days when I used to go to church, I recall preacher after preacher saying that finding God was not always easy (though one or two quoted Pascal's dictum that he who seeks God has already found him). Christ had put it a different way: 'Watch therefore; for you know not what hour your Lord doth come' (Matthew 24:42). In the same way, I believe, if you want to attain the kind of mystical, experience of nature which Wordsworth andJefferies and I and others have had the good fortune to enjoy, you must also open your heart to the possibility of it: the readiness is all.

The spiritual delights to be found in art are equally fulfilling and, among the people at large, increasingly popular. Since the end of the last war there has been a kind of explosion in the arts in the shape of concerts and plays, opera and ballet perfonnances, art exhibitions, poetry recitals, audio-tape readings, televised competitions for the BBC's Singer/Pianist/Musician of the Year, architectural competitions, success of Classic FM. So that Winwood Reade's prophecy of a hundred years ago that in the future art would take the place of religion looks like being fulfilled.