Often there is a reredos behind it; it is also fenced in by rails to preserve it from profanation of various kinds.
The last two passages agree in speaking of the capture of Jerusalem, the first declares Zion inviolable, and its capture an impossible profanation.
He was buried in the neighbouring church of St Laurent, where during the Revolution his bones underwent profanation.
But no society can legally proscribe the profanation of the sacred and call itself completely free.
The holiness of Israel centres in the sanctuary, and round the sanctuary stand the priests, who alone can approach the most holy things without profanation, and who are the guardians of Israel's sanctity, partly by protecting the one meeting-place of God and man from profane contact, and partly as the mediators of the continual atoning rites by which breaches of holiness are expiated.