“Not even in his well-earned retirement could he permit himself to be idle. To me, one of the most touching sights in the first year of my arrival here, was the indomitable perseverance with which every day the well-known figure of the old Principal would make its way, bag in hand, across the campus to the museum he loved so well, there to work for a time among the valuable collections which the University owes to his zeal, industry and devotion. It was in 1841 that he published his first scientific paper, and the activity which began then was continued down to the Thursday in the week before his death, when some reference to the mining industry of this country suggested to him that once more with failing hand and wearied brain he should put pen to paper on the subject of the 'Gold of Ophir.' And now he has entered into his rest,—affectionately tended to the last by the gentle care of a devoted and heroic wife, and solaced by the presence of a distinguished son and loving daughter. The world had no power to hold him any more. His work was done and his spirit yearned to pass beyond all earthly bounds.
“He is gone and we shall see his living face no more. But teachers and students alike may have ever with them the inspiration of his noble life and the stimulus of his high example. What he was to those who were so long his colleagues I leave others on this occasion to set before us. My closing words to the students of McGill must be the expression of a confident hope that the record of Sir William's life and work will always be an abiding memory in this place. If you will bear it about with you in your hearts, not only will you be kept from lip service, slackness, half-heartedness in your daily duties,—and from the graver faults of youth at which his noble soul would have revolted,—from dishonesty, sensuality and impurity in every form,—but you will be able, each in his sphere, to realise more fully the ideal of goodness and truth, so that at the last you, too, may hear the voices whispering as they have now spoken to him,—'Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.'”
APPENDIX D
The Peterson Memorial Address
On January 16th, 1921, a University Service in Memory of Sir William Peterson was held in the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, of which Sir William was a member and where he had worshipped during his twenty-four years in Canada. The following memorial address was given by the Rev. Principal D. J. Fraser (Arts '93), D.D., LL.D., of the Presbyterian College.
“Sir William Peterson had a fine reverence for sacred things and a keen appreciation of church worship. In the absence of a college chapel, which leaves McGill still lacking one note of catholicity, it is fitting that the Service to his memory, although a distinctively University Service, should be held in this Church where he worshipped with both the understanding and the spirit during the twenty-four years of his life amongst us. He had the Scot's proverbial taste for a good sermon, and he exacted that the pulpit should deal with Christianity as a rational religion and should make its appeal to the intelligence of the people. Knowing as he did that the Bible is the foundation not only of individual and national character but also of a comprehensive culture, and regretting that many children through home neglect had their only knowledge of it from the lessons heard in church, he pleaded that the Scriptures be reverently and clearly read. He was one of our highest authorities on hymnology and church music; he loved to join in singing the familiar psalms and paraphrases and hymns, and he appreciated as few in the congregation could the majestic anthems rendered by the choir. He never wantonly absented himself from the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the Presbyterian ritual of which, in close keeping with the form of the original Holy Meal, naturally appealed to him. Intellectual and mystical, historical and sacramental elements entered into his worship.
“I think his last diet of public worship, except the one at which he was stricken, was a Memorial Service in this Church to those who would not return from overseas, when I gave the sermon on a text chosen from those immortal verses of poetic beauty which have just been read by his successor (Revelation 22:4-5). Those, however, who laid down their lives for the cause of Empire and Humanity do not all sleep in Flanders and in France. Although in delicate physical health, he threw himself with abandon into the grim struggle from its very outset; he undertook the work of colleagues who had enlisted; he carried in his heart a tender solicitude for the lads from McGill who were exposed to peril; he acted almost as confidential adviser to the Government's Department of Militia; he advocated ceaselessly by voice and pen the cause so dear to his patriotic soul, until he inevitably broke under the strain; and to-day we memorialise as bonnie a fighter and as genuine a hero as any whose name is on our military Roll of Honour.
“Sir William Peterson was greatest as a scholar. It is hardly necessary that I refer to his brilliant career as a classical student at Edinburgh and Oxford, his priceless legacy to scholarship in the works of the Latin authors he edited and translated, his successful administration of University College, Dundee, at an extremely difficult time in its history, and his guidance of the affairs of McGill during its period of phenomenal growth from 1895 to 1919; for many of you who were his colleagues are better qualified than I to estimate the value of these activities. He preserved to the end the instincts and habits of the scholar. When he enjoyed a period of freedom from his administrative duties it was to the libraries of America and Europe that he gravitated in the scholar's quest for old documents that would yield the scholar's joy of new discovery; and on his last holiday visit to Scotland, deprived by the war of access to the libraries of the Continent, he happened upon an unpublished document of the seventeenth century by what he modestly called 'a lucky chance.' We know, however, that these happy finds come only to those who have the genius of the literary discoverer, and characteristic of the textual critic is his parting message to us in his delightful description of his new-found treasure given in a magazine article under the prophetic title—'A Last Will and Testament.'