"Moral Rearmament" is entering a heyday. The personalistic revival movement which started under Frank Buchman as the Oxford Group after the first World War and took hold in the United States most successfully in the late Thirties now bids for big stakes, proclaiming that it offers "the answering ideology to Communism." Last Monday and Tuesday nights' overflow crowds of fashionable gentry at the Colonial Theatre watched Boston's free-of-charge performances of "The Good Road," MRA's touring propaganda spokesman in musical revue guise.

The MRA thesis throughout the world follows simple lines: society can survive only if each individual catches fire with the unselfish desire to live by standards of "absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love." Within the movement itself this involves "quiet times" in the Quaker manner providing for communion with God. To the world crisis this spells an attitude sweeping out at a nebulous "materialism" which is today's embodiment of the bad in human nature.

"The Good Road" opens with a topical routine tipping off the political message ("keep your eye--upon the good road--not the left, not the right, but the Good Road") and proceeds to show through scenes in the home and in industry how outgoing goodwill and trust should solve a multitude of difficulties. Then comes the viciously vague anti-materialism episode which leaves doubtful what has been included in the attack. In the finale "Which Way, America" the obscure "Good Road" theme repeats.

Although the content of the show strikes frequent depths of trite polemic, the zealousness of the 300-odd performers, many traveling over the globe for MRA, more than lends an excitement sufficient in itself to justify the expenditure of an evening and to pose the pressing question of what MRA will mean given real momentum. The idealistic drive of this movement finds rare equal at the present moment. In utter seriousness the show's participants call themselves a "task force." They feel themselves engaged in a crusade to save civilization. MRA's overriding interest rests not in its feverish adherents so much as in the social elements to which the appeal goes forth. "The Good Road" plays before "invitation" audiences of people with either means or influence. Furthermore, the public figures who lend it the strength of their names include, in addition to chairman Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, both the moneyed such as the New York Stock Exchange's Emil Sehram and the politically entrenched such as Senators Arthur Capper and Alexander Wiley as well as Presidential adviser John R. Steelman. MRA is out to win the minds of the policy-shapers and the public-opinion leaders. Its great vitality renders it worth the watching.