THEY are the one thing that you would think are immune from the greedy hands of thieves.

Stored safely in glass display cabinets and book cases tucked in the corner of quiet rural Hampshire churches - they were being protected for the worshippers of the future.

But one Hampshire crook is now prowling country churches on the hunt for valuable antique Bibles.

In his latest cunning theft, an 18th century Bible was taken from a country church.

The crime was not spotted for days because the thief had replaced the valuable book, known as a Vinegar Bible, with another similar-sized one.

The theft took place from a bookcase at St Mary's Church in Twyford, near Winchester.

Vinegar Bibles were printed in Oxford in 1717 when the printer John Baskett mistakenly transposed vinegar' with vinyard' in Luke, chapter 20.

A series of seven volumes of the Old and New Testament, dating from 1800, have been stolen from St John's Church in Farley Chamberlayne, near Romsey.

There, the thief wasn't quite as sly. He helped himself after smashing the glass front of a display cabinet.

Both churches were also targeted several years ago when bishops' chairs were stolen. Experts then reckoned that the most likely market for the chairs was the United States.

St Mary's vicar, the Rev Mark Bailey, said: "Someone seems to be doing the rounds. Another Vinegar Bible was recently stolen from a church in Devon.

"We have lost something special to this community. Part of its character has been taken away. There will be a lot of sad people here on Sunday.

"It was a very professional thief. He replaced our Bible with another old Bible. He used a key to unlock the case.

"Has this Bible been stolen to order? The market is very small. They are not the kind of thing you buy in Woolworths."

Mr Bailey said that the church would not be shut. "Churches are vulnerable but we are not considering closing the church at all," he said.

He said that the thief was not the same burglar who raided the church last year and whose images were captured on closed-circuit TV.

Molly Walker, churchwarden at Farley Chamberlayne, said: "The Bibles were locked up in a case that hadn't been opened in 20 years. No one knows where the key is. We have no idea of their value. Someone has guessed £500.

"Everything else in the church is padlocked to the floor. We have had problems in the past with thieving, but we don't want to lock the church. That is against everything we stand for."

It is the second time that Twyford has lost the Bible. In the 1930s it was mysteriously lost, but in the 1970s it turned up at an auction and previous vicar Geoff Holland bought it back.

In 2002 police investigated a spate of thefts of church furniture from Hampshire churches.