Tilak had thrown himself into journalism, and after the repeal of the Indian Press Law on the return of a Liberal Administration to office at home in 1881, he had been amongst the first to revive the incendiary methods which it had temporarily and very successfully checked.

His first onslaught upon Ranade's position, however, failed, and instead of supplanting him, it was he who was compelled in 1890 to sever his connexion with the Education Society.
Tilak's defeat was short lived.

The introduction of the Age of Consent Bill, in 1890, to mitigate the evils of Hindu child-marriage, gave him a fresh opening.

Ranade, discouraged and alarmed by the violence of the Tilak party, had by this time retired from the forefront of the fray, but in Dr.Bhandarkar, Mr.Justice Tilang, Mr.A.K.Nulkar, Mr.( now Sir N.G.) Chandavarkar, and other courageous Hindu reformers, with whom Mr.
Gokhale was always ready to co-operate against the forces of religious superstition, he had left disciples ready to carry on the good fight.
Tilak raised against them a storm of passion and prejudice.

In the columns of the _Kesari_, of which he had become sole proprietor, he denounced every Hindu who supported the measure as a renegade and a traitor to the cause of Hinduism, and thus won the support of conservative orthodoxy, which had hitherto viewed with alarm some of his literary excursions into the field of Vedantic exegesis.