Charles Edward Jefferson was born at Cambridge, Ohio, on August 29, 1860, the son of Dr. Milton Jefferson, a native of Virginia, and his wife, Ella Sachet, born in the Isle of Guernsey. It was a Methodist family, and Charles graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1882. He was superintendent of schools in Washington, Ohio, for two years, and then went to Boston to study law at Harvard, having at that time little interest in the church or Christianity. But one evening he went to Trinity Church to hear Phillips Brooks. "At last I had discovered a preacher," he said. "I wanted all my friends in the West to hear him. I felt sorry for them because they did not live in Boston. I longed to tell everybody about him." In a sermon which he preached in Trinity Church in 1931 he said of his preacher-hero: "Every sermon was baptized in the spirit of Christ. No matter what his text, one could always feel certain that before he got done with us, we should all be standing before the judgment seat of Christ."