In the jungles of South America, there lives a peculiar, indolent creature known as the three-toed sloth. Actually named for one of the seven deadly sins, the sloth will spend at least eighteen hours each day sleeping. Even when awake, this lazy creature remains almost motionless. When it does move, its sluggish movements are excruciatingly slow. Being too lazy to indulge in personal grooming, its coarse hair provides a home for two species of bluegreen algae, a cockroach-like moth, and hundreds of beetles. Apparently, the sloth is not anxious about its life, what it shall eat or what it shall drink, nor what it shall put on. One thing is for certain; this lethargic oddity is not in the least concerned with such engaging matters as theology or morality.

This is not to condemn the sloth fo…