But with all our investigation we shall find that we must rely in the end on our trust in some person; either ourselves or someone else.  Even the certainty of the mathematical formula depends on our confidence in the sanity of our own mental processes.  The man who sees the basket filled with white pebbles must trust the accuracy of his eyesight.  If he relies for his information on what someone else told him, he must trust not only that other’s eyesight, but his memory, his veracity, his friendliness.  And yet one may be far safer in trusting another than in relying on his own unaided powers. Securus judicat orbis terrarum, says the old Latin.  “The world’s judgment is safe.”  We have learned to modify this, for we have seen world judgments that are manifestly incorrect.  The world thought the earth was flat.  It thought there were witches, and it burned them.  Here individuals simply followed one another like sheep; and all, like sheep, went astray.  But where there is a real, independent judgment on the part of each member of a group, and all agree, that is better proof of its correctness than most individual investigations could furnish.  My watch, of the best make and carefully regulated, indicates five o’clock, but if I meet five friends, each of whom tells me, independently, that it is six, I conclude that my watch is wrong.  There was never a more careful scientific investigation than that by which a French physicist thought he had established the existence of what he called the “N ray”—­examined its properties and measured its constants.  He read paper after paper before learned bodies as his research progressed.  He challenged the interest of his brother scientists on three continents.  And yet he was entirely wrong:  there never was any “N ray.”  The man had deceived himself.  The failure of hundreds to see as he did weighed more than his positive testimony that he saw what he thought he saw.  Here as elsewhere our view of what may be the truth is based on trust.  If you trust the French physicist, you will still believe in the “N ray.”  Creeds we are told, are outworn, and yet we are confronted, from birth to death, with situations that imperiously require action of some sort.  Every act that responds must be based on belief of some kind.  Creeds are only expressions of belief.  The kind of Creed that is outworn (and this is doubtless what intelligent persons mean when they make this statement) is the parrot creed, the form of words without meaning, the statement of belief without any grounds behind it or any action in front of it.  For this the modern churchman has no use.