These prayer texts give a picture of Christian worship in its simplest and purest form (“springtime of the liturgy”). Each of the prayers is introduced by a commentary that deals with the provenance of the text and its content.
The texts begin with Jewish prayers, continue in the New Testament, and go through forty-five subsequent prayers down to the Prayer Book of 1790.
Every major revision of liturgical texts during the last thirty years has been strongly influenced by these early eucharistic texts.