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. With the help of the brothers Natu, who were the recognized leaders of Hindu orthodoxy, he carried his propaganda into the schools and colleges in the teeth of the Moderate party, and, proclaiming that unless they learnt to employ force the Hindus must expect to be impotent witnesses of the gradual downfall of all their ancient institutions, he proceeded to organize gymnastic societies in which physical training and the use of more or less primitive weapons were taught in order to develop the martial instincts of the rising generation.