In the following essay, Bell comments on moral themes in Wuthering Heights, focusing in particular on the Biblical allusions in narrator Lockwood's first dream.

The two dreams Lockwood experiences early in Wuthering Heights-the first of a visit to Gimmerton Kirk, and the second of a visit from the ghost-child Catherine-have recently received critical attention from Ruth M. Adams and Edgar Shannon. Of the two interpretations Shannon's ["Lockwood's Dreams and the Exegesis of Wuthering Heights, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, September, 1959] seems the most convincing in that it of fers the only plausible source for the Biblical allusion in the first dream; but in discussing the relationship of the dream sermon and its title to the tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine, Shannon ignores significant aspects of the dream itself, and consequently the value of his interpretation seems impaired somewhat, like Miss Adams's, by its own ingenuity.

The preacher that Lockwood hears...