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."

Now that he had discovered what preaching was, he began to wish to be a preacher, though he was still a skeptic, full of doubts. He had an interview with Brooks and after a week decided to enter the ministry. He spent three years at the Boston School of Theology, and during that time heard Brooks constantly and learned more from him than from his professors. "He kindled a fire in me. He made me believe in God, in man and in myself. I have now been preaching for forty-four years, just twice as many years as he preached in Trinity and through all of these years his face has been in my eyes and his voice has been in my ears."

Jefferson graduated from Boston School of Theology in 1887, and was called in September of that year to the Congregational Church in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He left there in 1898 to become the minister of the Broadway Tabernacle -- now the Broadway Congregational Church -- in New York, where he remained for thirty-one years, becoming pastor-emeritus on his retirement in 1930.

There is no biography or autobiography of Jefferson. His entire and consecrated devotion to his vocation makes him the despair of the biographer. The settings of his life work were so relatively simple as to need no long telling.

A biographer loves drama. The drama of Jefferson's life was outwardly in climbing his pulpit stairs, preaching the sermons in whose preparation he had spent secluded hours. He lived more than almost any of the great preachers of his time between his study, pulpit, and pen. In this he is strikingly similar to Alexander Maclaren of Manchester. Like his English counterpart, Jefferson served only two churches, and he was also like him in being shy, retiring, and austere in appearance. They were both Puritan in character and Christian ideals. A penetrating seriousness is traceable through all their preaching and published works.

Preaching was more than a profession to Jefferson. It was a commission from God. He regarded his ministry not as a task but as a privilege, the greatest work in the world. He declared that he would rather be the pastor of Broadway Tabernacle than hold any other position on earth. He regarded preaching as the minister's chief business and believed that only as he studied hard every day could he stand in the pulpit with a message worth hearing.