N.B. This review is of the 1963 second edition of this work. Some of the defects may have been remedied in more recent editions.
I would guess that this was intended as a source-book to go with the ecclesiastical history course for ordinands to the Church of England ministry. This would explain the rather skewed representation of the Church: very little on post-schism Orthodoxy, or Protestantism outside England. (I really do mean England – the Church of Scotland gets a mere two pages.)
The layout is broadly chronological, with thematically related documents of the same period grouped together, though there are sudden jumps of a few centuries. Most are introduced with a brief note about their context (often making it clear what the compiler’s own ecclesiology is), but these presuppose some knowledge of the subject matter and history, presumably supplied in the course the book would accompany. So you are expected to know what ‘Monophysite’ means, as this term is never explained. More confusingly, kings and emperors come and go, without the reader being told where they were king of.
The reader also has to struggle with artificially archaic language in some of the translations. For example the Didache was only discovered in 1873, so the translation of it cannot be earlier than that, but it is still rendered into pseudo-Authorised Version English. And while the original translators of the AV had the advantage of being native speakers of 17th-century English (and stylistic masters of writing it), the same can’t be said of this 19th-century pastiche.
Very few of the documents collected here would make anyone feel glad to be a Christian, and the overall impression is of a preoccupation for declaring those who don’t agree with you to be anathema. The exceptions include some touching early Christian epitaphs, and a more hopeful concluding section dealing with moves towards church unity.
My edition is a 1963 reprint (although I believe it was purchased new in the 1980’s!), so sadly it misses some of the most significant documents of recent Christian history: those of the Second Vatican Council. More recent editions (with additional sections by Chris Maunder) include this and other 20th and 21st century material.