The Church itself had deteriorated as the towns in their civil capacity had undertaken the support of the minister and to collect his rates. Even earlier began, also, the gradual change by which the election of the minister passed from the small group of church communicants, or full membership, to the larger body of the Society, and finally to the town. This change was partly brought about through the increasing acceptance of the Half-Way Covenant with its attendant results. In some localities, "owning the Covenant" and presenting one's children for baptism came to be considered not as a necessary fulfilling of inherited duties (because of inherited baptismal privileges) and the consequent recognition of moral obligations, but as meritorious acts, having of themselves power to benefit the participants. Further, the rite of baptism, confined at first to children one at least of whose parents had been baptized, was later permitted to any for whom a satisfactory person--any one not flagrantly immoral--could be found to promise that the child should have religious training. Still another factor in the lowering of religious life was Stoddardeanism, or the teaching of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Massachusetts, a most powerful preacher and for many years the most influential minister throughout the Connecticut valley. As early as 1679, he began to teach that baptized persons, who had owned the covenant, should be admitted to the Lord's Supper, so that the rite itself might exercise in them a regenerating grace. In its origin, this teaching was probably intended as a protest against a morbid, introspective, and weakening self-examination on the part of many who doubted their fitness to go to communion. But as a result of the interworking of this teaching and of the practice of the Half-Way Covenant, church membership came in time to include almost any one not openly vicious, and willing to give intellectual, or nominal, assent to church doctrines and also to a few church regulations. With the change, the large body of townsmen became the electors of the minister. Cotton Mather in the "Ratio Disciplinæ" [52] illustrates these changing conditions when he tells us that the communicants felt that the right to elect the minister was invested in them as the real church of Christ, and that, in order to avoid strife or the defeat of their candidate by the majority of the town, they would customarily propose a choice between two nominees.