Christ's Idea of Christianity.
I. The kingdom of God, or the beginning of a truly religious life in the soul of a man, may be obscure, imperceptible and unconscious. When a man is building a house he sees it as it goes on. That is an outside matter. A man goes into his garden and plants seed. He may sit up all night with spectacles and a lantern, but he will not see anything going on; and yet there is something going on which is vitally connected with the whole operation of vegetable development. So is it with the spiritual life. The work of God in the human soul is gradual. Further, the working of religion in the human soul is not scattering, accidental, promiscuous, just as it may happen. It has its regular stages, and one will not precede the other except in the order of these stages. First the blade, then the ear, then the kernel in the ear, and you cannot make one of them anticipate the others so that they will not follow in that sequence.
II. Conversion is often an imperceptible condition. That is, when a man is converted in the old-fashioned understanding of that word, when he has passed from death to life, when the balance is struck, and it is for purity, for holiness, for obedience to God, for love; he may not know it. Unconscious piety is simply this, the being trained from your cradle by your surrounding circumstances into those very moods and into that very purpose of life which conversion means. It is being inwardly changed, away from animal toward spiritual life; away from the law of selfishness toward the law of a true love. The moment a man can have the testimony of himself that that is his purpose, though not his attainment, then he is converted, though he may not know it.
H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,p. 120.
Reference: Mark 4:27; Mark 4:28. W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 209.