For the elders who have died, not only is there the command given by a religion, but there is the experience on the other side of death. Now of all the miseries which can follow a man into the world after death, of all the miseries, the results of drink are perhaps almost the most terrible. There is a constant craving, for not in the physical body but in the senses of the Sūkṣhma Sharīra, lie the craving, the desire, the longing for sensual gratification; and, if a man has been drunken, if he has been profligate in his life, he finds himself tortured on the other side of death by the drink he cannot enjoy, by the craving of the sex instinct which he cannot gratify. Torn by the agony of longing, frustrated by the impossibility of gratification, there is branded on that soul, as with a red-hot iron: "It is foolish to yield to gratification that brings about the misery that now I am suffering." He has to starve out the craving by non-satisfaction, and the agonies of starvation are his doom. And so is impressed on the lasting memory of the man the knowledge that suffering follows on the undue gratification of the passions of the body. That comes back in the next life--or after many lives--that comes back in an innate distaste for this form of sense-gratification. You say: "Would it not have been better that he should have been spared this long experience?" Nay, it would not have been better; for you are only finally rid of a craving, when you cease to desire that which gratifies it; and the teaching of pain kills the _desire_, whereas the enforced abstinence, not killing the desire, would ever leave you a prey to the possibility of temptation. That is why the striking of the transgressor by the disregarded law, is the veriest mercy in the long life of Man.