The nonconformist mission projected this ideology most tangibly in its discourse about labor. Methodist rhetoric, in particular, drew on the symbols of the industrial workplace, teaching the Tshidi that wage-labor was the divine instrument of redemption (J. Comaroff 1985:132). They spoke of labor as a commodity to be measured against other commodities, to be bought and sold in the market (cf. Marx 1967[1867](1):167ff.). Counted in hours and valued in coins, it was the price of life eternal, to be husbanded wisely on individual account. Labor power was an alienable part of each human being and should be spent in pursuit of a solitary salvation. The labor relation, moreover, was assumed to be an ethical one. Worker and master each had a function, performing their role as a divine calling (Warner 1930:146f.). Industrious self-dis- cipline went along with an acceptance of the given "design" of the social world. Like Wesley before them, the Protestant missionaries in South Africa encouraged docility in the workplace. Its trials and sufferings were to be bravely borne, for they were the means of moral advance- ment.