by RICHARD PYLE
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - For the sixth time in history, a pre-revolutionary Bible owned by the Masonic order will be used on Saturday for the swearing in of a U.S. president.

George Washington was the first, in 1789. The last was George H.W. Bush, who used the Bible in 1989 and will be sitting nearby as his son, George W. Bush, takes the oath of office as the nation's 43rd president.

On Friday, three officials of the Manhattan-based St. John's Lodge of the Free and Accepted Masons will board an Amtrak liner for Washington, D.C., carrying the nine-pound, 234-year-old King James Bible in a special container. At Union Station, they will be met by inaugural committee
officials.

Whether George W. will use two Bibles, a family one atop the Masons' copy, as his father did, was not known.

Bound in London in 1767, the Bible was brought to the colonies and given by Jonathan Hampton to the St. John's Lodge in lower Manhattan three years later, when he became its master.

Needing a Bible to swear in Washington at Federal Hall on April 30, 1789, then-New York Gov. Robert Livingston, a Masonic grand master, borrowed the lodge's copy. A statue of Washington marks the site in front of the present-day Federal Hall on Wall Street.

No printer in the colonies produced Bibles at the time, and the London import, bound in maroon Moroccan leather with silver hasps, was "probably
close to a year's wages for the average fellow," said John Mountain, a spokesman for St. John's Lodge and one of the Bible's trio of escorts.

Despite its age and history, the lodge puts no monetary value today on the book. "I guess the word is priceless," Mountain said in a telephone
interview.

Other presidents who have placed their left hand on the Masonic Bible were Warren G. Harding in 1921, Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, and Jimmy Carter in 1977. Among the six, only Washington and Harding were Masons, according to Mountain.

Harry Truman, probably the most active Mason among the nation's chief executives, did not use it, nor did several other Masons who served as president.

In 1867, President Andrew Johnson, attending the dedication of a new Masonic temple in Boston, asked that the George Washington inaugural Bible be brought to his hotel room, and was seen by aides "to weep as he held it in his hands," Mountain said.

In addition to its role in presidential oath-taking, the Bible was used at Washington's
funeral in December, 1799, the dedication of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. in 1885, the re-laying of the U.S. Capitol's cornerstone in 1959, and the christening of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington at Norfolk, Va., in 1992.

It was on display at the New York world's fair in 1964-65, Mountain said, and at the White House for 30 days after Bush the elder's inaugural.

Between travels, it is maintained by the National Parks Service in a protective display case at Federal Hall, open to Genesis 49, 50, the pages on which Washington rested his hand to be sworn in.

It's that link on "Genesis 49" that gets me. I wonder how much they know.

Grugyn Silverbristle